Muslims Flood Toward Bosnia to Escape Atrocities

Heeding the message of atrocities against fellow Muslims in Kosovo, Samir Ramovic decided to stay a step ahead of the army and spirit his family out of Yugoslavia in a self-imposed act of “ethnic cleansing.”

He and more than 20,000 others have flooded into neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina from Yugoslavia over the past five days, fearing that the killing and expulsions terrorizing Kosovo would come their way next.

Ramovic’s neighbors who stayed behind in the Muslim region of Yugoslavia, known as the Sandjak, learned Monday that they may have missed their chance to escape.

Sandjak Muslims arriving in the already refugee-packed Bosnian capital said they had witnessed Serbian authorities forcibly conscripting men as old as 65, confiscating money and vehicles from those trying to flee, and preventing women from leaving.

“All the women between 18 and 50 are being turned back at the border,” said Murat Kakhrovic, who was waiting at the Sarajevo bus station for his wife and daughter despite a call from relatives in the Sandjak telling him that their journey to safety had been thwarted. “The whole bus of 50 people was sent back into Serbia, and only God knows what will happen to them.”

The exodus from the Sandjak, a hilly expanse of Serbia extending from northwestern Kosovo into the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, was triggered by warnings aired on Belgrade Radio last week that the Sandjak, home to many Muslims, and Vojvodina, home to many ethnic Hungarians, would be the next to face the rage of Serbian fighters, Ramovic said.

The 40-year-old owner of a small shoe factory in Novi Pazar said that warning and the beating and interrogation he was subjected to by Serbian police officers a month ago convinced him that no Muslims are safe in Yugoslavia as long as Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic is president and wields absolute power.

Officials with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees confirmed reports from Sandjak refugees that the Serb-controlled police forces had virtually halted the Sandjak exodus overnight.

“We are concerned about the situation of Muslims in Sandjak as there is more and more uncertainty and desperation about being there, especially among the men being called up to join the army,” said Wendy Rappaport, a U.N. refugee agency official in Sarajevo.

The refugee office had records of about 5,000 Sandjak refugees entering Bosnia last week, but the Bosnian Ministry for Civil Affairs and Communications updated its count late Monday to more than 20,000, noting that 11,000 people had entered Bosnia through a single border crossing over the preceding 48 hours.

“Serb police began coming into our shops and just taking what they wanted without paying. That’s what told me it was time to leave,” said Sefcet Ujkanovic, who said he left $20,000 worth of stock behind when he fled Friday.

Sarajevo, Zenica, Tuzla and other predominantly Muslim cities in Bosnia are already flooded with those displaced by four years of war and “ethnic cleansing” at the hands of Bosnian Serbs armed and instigated by Milosevic.

Having been down the tragic road of the refugee themselves, Bosnian Muslims have opened their hearts and their homes to Milosevic’s latest victims.

The sympathy and shelter being offered by Bosnian Muslims for have eased the burden on overwhelmed local governments, but city officials are duty-bound to organize food, first aid and permanent housing, said Muharem Hamzic, head of the Sarajevo-based Assn. of Bosniaks [Muslims] from Sandjak.

“Bosnians are helping as much as they can, but they don’t have much to give. People here are mostly unemployed, and the cities are full of demobilized soldiers,” Hamzic said.

Other Sandjak natives, who number about 250,000 in Bosnia without the latest influx, say the exodus is only making it easier for Milosevic to establish an ethnically pure state.

“It’s of enormous importance that they stay and express their opposition to what is happening there,” journalist Senad Slatina, of the magazine Slobodna Bosna (Free Bosnia), said of the Sandjak Muslims. “If they leave now, the Serbs will . . . never allow them back.”

But against the backdrop of horror unleashed in Kosovo, the refugees insist that the Sandjak will not be safe until Milosevic is defeated.

“Only war sustains his power, and he will attack someone else when he is finished in Kosovo,” said Safet Sinanovic, a construction worker who fled Sandjak with his family over the weekend, taking a circuitous route through Montenegro. “That is why NATO must keep bombing. Milosevic must be brought to his knees.”