Gorazde’s Survivors Haunted by Hatred, Wartime Memories

Shrapnel gouges Damir Kulelija’s insides, but the real pain is deeper.

He had wanted only to create--the fresh-faced high school graduate had just registered to study architecture in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital 35 miles to the northwest. Instead, the Bosnian war flung him headlong into destruction.

“Night was falling,” Kulelija said, his sallow features tensing as he recalled the first shots in Gorazde. “Suddenly a Mercedes with Serbs drove up. As they passed by, the driver swung a submachine gun out his window and opened fire. They hit a man, two bullets to the stomach. Then they sped off, over to the Serb side. From that time on, everyone expected the worst.”

Barricades were built. The Serbs got arms from the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army. The Muslims made do with old hunting rifles, pistols and homemade shotguns made of lead pipe.

After softening up Gorazde for two months with artillery, the Serbs began infantry and tank attacks.

“I never want to feel anything as bad as that again,” Kulelija said of his first taste of battle. “We poured gasoline into bottles and made firebombs. They attacked us with T-84 tanks. They shot about 2,000 shells at the center of town.

“They broke one part of our line and torched a house with a flamethrower, but we forced them back. I gave the best of myself, and the enemy had a lot of casualties.”

Food grew short, and the United Nations began to convoy in sustenance in mid-1992.

But with the Serbs controlling access, there were months when no food arrived. The worst was early 1993. In desperation, hundreds set out at night, trekking 16 hours in knee-deep snow over rugged hills and front lines to Grebak, west of Gorazde, for flour, oil and other necessities.

“With a horse, you could bring back 100 kilos [220 pounds] of flour,” Kulelija said. “On your back you could bring 30 or 40 kilos, but it was backbreaking. What the weight didn’t accomplish, the cold did. Dozens died. They called the route to Grebak the route of the dead. And death was white, because snow was white.”

The town was frequently on the brink of falling--saved sometimes by its own defenders, sometimes from the air by U.N. food drops or NATO airstrikes on its Serb besiegers. Heavy airstrikes in August 1994 around Gorazde, Sarajevo and elsewhere helped break the Serb will for battle.

“People were out on the streets, on the balconies, applauding,” Kulelija said of the big NATO attacks. “It was like one huge party. You could see a rocket hitting a Serb transmission tower, and then other missiles followed.

“I remember jubilating: ‘You sons of bitches, you deserve it. How does it feel to be on the receiving end for a change?’ ”

Kulelija was wounded twice by mortar shells, in 1992 and 1994. His flesh bears gouge marks the size of two upturned palms, and he carries two chunks of shrapnel inside his body.

“The past four years? A total loss,” he said. “This war changed me into a tough, uncaring man. It killed all my feelings. I’ll never be able to regain them. Never!”

*

Amra Efendic was in love with the enemy but didn’t know it back on May 4, 1992, when she was a teenager ignorant of the ethnic divide about to engulf her.

Three days earlier, Efendic, now 19, was talking with her Serb boyfriend in nearby Foca.

“He told me, ‘Be ready, in three days we will start to shoot at you,’ ” she said. “And he started laughing, and I thought he was kidding. And after three days, they started shelling. My love turned to hate in that instant.”

Efendic also recalls the terrible, food-short days of 1993. Some people were crushed to death by parachuted food, and others died fighting over aid packages. But countless others were saved.

“One night, a pallet almost hit me and my boyfriend. It fell two or three meters [yards] from us,” she said. “After it landed, I saw guys with guns running toward us. One took a knife and sliced open a big bag of flour. I filled a plastic bag with it, snatched a stuffed toy elephant, and we started to run before someone stole what we had.

“It was my 17th birthday.”

Things improved after U.N. peacekeepers set up base in Gorazde in early 1994. Convoys arrived, and Serb attacks nearly ceased.

But the respite was brief. By that April, the town again was under heavy attack. With the hospital overflowing with casualties, an emergency clinic was set up at the Red Cross office.

“I remember the dead and the dying--my boyfriend bringing in a girl in his arms, and his chest covered with blood,” said Efendic, who worked at the Red Cross.

“I remember a shell exploding in a bathroom, killing a woman and three small children. One of the children was all over the apartment--a head in one room, a hand in another, a leg somewhere else.

“I remember sitting at my desk and dead bodies stacked up next to me. I stopped thinking it was anything unusual after a while--there was nowhere else to put them.”

The fighting has been stopped since November. Slowly, Gorazde is recovering. A few cafes have reopened, and the crowds of ragged pedestrians are learning again to make way for the occasional car.

*

Most important is the chink in the town’s long isolation--buses drive to Sarajevo twice a week even though the trip through Serb territory comes only with a NATO armored escort.

“I feel old, old beyond my years,” Efendic said. “Sometimes I cry for no reason. Being closed in for the past four years, the same people, the same coffeehouses--come on, I need a life!”

*

Thirteen-year-old Edin Bijedic can still make Gorazde’s laughter, light and love come alive with his stories. But that was a time of innocence, before the shelling, the snipers, the starving.

“I didn’t expect anything,” said Edin, a shy smile crinkling his eyes. “I had no idea what war was, I used to play handball with the Serb kids and go swimming with them. I really had no idea which of my friends were Serb and which were Muslim.

“They shelled us for three days solid. Hearing the explosions, my only thought was, ‘Let me die because they’re going to come and butcher the whole town.’ ”

Nothing was easy anymore.

“I had to go for water to a well, about a kilometer away,” he said, jumping from his chair to mime how he staggered under his load.

“I had to run across one street because of sniper fire. I was a little scared, but I never thought they could kill me.

“I changed my mind on May 7. I heard a shot, and I saw a woman fall in front of me. I saw death on her face.”

The signs of war are still everywhere. Pavement is scarred by shell holes. Many houses are roofless. Protective trenches bisect open areas.

*

A rickety footbridge hung for protection under a permanent span is now a plaything, swaying as children scamper across it.

The town can be rebuilt--perhaps more easily than young lives.

“I’ve changed now,” Edin said. “I’ve been scared once too often--by the shelling, by the aircraft. This war took some of my family. My cousin was killed defending this town.

“I hate the Serbs because they wounded my father. Yes, I hate them all!”

BACKGROUND

Encircled from the war’s start, Gorazde and its nearby villages held out desperately for 3 1/2 years while other Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia fell. Its oldest defenders were in their 70s, the youngest 12. About 4,000 to 5,000 people died, most of them civilians. Now the guns are silent and the town is trying to recover. But memories get in the way.