Muslims Return to Sarajevo Suburb With a Vengeance

Through days of arson fires and rising tension, 52-year-old Bozidar Ratkovic, a Serb, resisted pressure from Bosnian Serb gangs to abandon the farm and home he owned in this Sarajevo suburb.

They threatened to kill him if he stayed after Ilidza switched to Muslim-Croat control. He began to tell people that he planned to join the Serbian exodus, even though he had no intention of doing so.

But on Wednesday, the day after Muslim-Croat authorities took over the hard-line Serbian district, Ratkovic watched in dismay as newly arrived Muslim gangs drove off with his farm equipment.

He fully expected the belligerent youths to take the animals next, and another group demanded his apartment.

Serbs who dared to heed the international community’s plea that they stay in a capital city reunifying under the Bosnian peace accord are now being victimized by Muslims engaged in looting, intimidation and death threats, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and U.N. international police officials said.

Many feel forced to flee, as the latest turn in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s wheel of ethnic strife sees displaced Muslims displacing Serbs.

The situation also plays into the hands of hard-line Bosnian Serb leaders such as Radovan Karadzic, who said all along that Muslims and Serbs can’t live together--and waged a war based on the idea of “ethnically purifying” areas by force.

“This is another blow to the multiethnic character of Sarajevo,” U.N. spokesman Alexander Ivanko said. “It is a shame, really a shame, that some of the people who have come to Ilidza from Sarajevo are behaving in the same appalling and outrageous manner as some of the Serbs were before they left the area--intimidating and harassing law-abiding people.”

International police monitors received more than 100 complaints overnight, Ivanko said, with some Muslims reportedly threatening their victims with grenades or explosives.

U.N. officials were especially critical of the Muslim-led Sarajevo government for failing to control its people.

Ratkovic, the Ilidza farmer, is braver than most, vowing not to abandon the town he has called home for 35 years.

“I stayed here to spite the Serbs,” he said, “and now I will stay here to spite the Muslims.”

Others were less resilient.

Men began knocking on the door of 71-year-old Lena Crkvenjas’ two-story family home early Tuesday, asking if she would be willing to give them her house. Three of the men insisted on staying the night, departing Wednesday with plastic bags full of clothing, a radio and other household goods.

Crkvenjas fried them eggs for breakfast but told them that she and her 80-year-old husband, Simo, wanted to keep their house.

“It was unpleasant, but you have to survive,” she said, tears flushing her cheeks. “We want to stay. We are old. What can we do if we go?”

Up and down Crkvenjas’ street in a heavily Serb Ilidza neighborhood, home after home was in the process of being occupied or looted Wednesday. Those that had been abandoned, even temporarily, were easy prey.

Arriving Muslims had placed hand-lettered signs on the homes, stating they were now the possession of sehid families, the word used to describe Bosnian Muslim fighters “martyred” in the war.

About a dozen young Muslim men in civilian clothes and with army-style haircuts roamed the street and took orders from a man with a notebook and expensive walkie-talkie.

Confronted by reporters, the man said he worked for “civil protection” under Bosnia’s Interior Ministry, a repository of hard-line Muslim militancy.

The men watched calmly as other Muslims openly looted homes and drove or walked away with goods.

One couple loaded a hot water tank in the back of their blue van. Some challenged the remaining Serbs who peered from their windows or front porches: “Who owns this house? Is it Serb?”

One homeowner placed a sign on his gate, saying, “This house has an owner. You cannot move in. It is not Serbian. The owner is present.”

Many Muslims, themselves driven from their villages in eastern and central Bosnia at the start of the war, feel entitled to homes belonging to their enemies, the Serbs.

Peter Fitzgerald, the commissioner in charge of the U.N. International Police Task Force, acknowledged that the 90 police from the Muslim-Croat federation, which moved into Ilidza on Tuesday, were not enough to control a spiraling law-and-order crisis.

A young Serbian lawyer from Ilidza who had been part of the efforts to encourage Serbs to stay and work with the Muslim-Croat leadership said he had to wrestle with Muslim thugs trying to break into his home Wednesday.

After a long night of fear, he said, his entire neighborhood came to him to ask what they should do.

“Before, I had decided to stay,” he said. “But now I am reconsidering. If there are no big changes, not a single Serb will remain.”

A 41-year-old secretary who lived on Crkvenjas’ street watched Muslim families and soldiers occupy the neighboring homes belonging to her mother-in-law and uncle, both of whom had left.

“One of the soldiers told me he was now my neighbor,” she said. “I told him that was my uncle’s house, and he couldn’t have it. He closed the door.”

The soldier’s muddy tennis shoes were outside the door of his new house.

Next door, a Muslim couple who had fled their heavily damaged central Bosnian town had moved in.

They were comfortably eating lunch when reporters knocked on the door. The husband said he had made an “exchange” with the house’s rightful owner, an unlikely prospect since the owner had told neighbors that he was leaving only for a few days and would be back.

Out of a population of 20,000, 2,000 to 3,000 Serbs, most of them elderly, had resisted the exodus, and many left saying they would return once they saw whether it was safe.

But now, with Muslims occupying their homes, it is not clear what they can return to.