After 10 months of civil war in what used to be Yugoslavia, perhaps 1.5 million people are homeless. At least 700,000 citizens of Bosnia and Hercegovina have been dispossessed in the last month alone. The Serbian attacks were particularly savage on Bosnia’s Muslims–44 percent of the population. But every ethnic group is suffering. In the former Yugoslav state as a whole, half a million Croats have been uprooted from areas overrun by Serbs. More than 100,000 Serbs have fled homes in Croatia and Bosnia. Last week, while Muslim Slavs fled north toward Tuzla, a caravan of at least 10,000 ethnic Serbs fled in the opposite direction. Says the UNHCR’s Judith Kumin, “It’s displacement on an enormous, shocking scale.”
The combatants’ disregard for the usual wartime conventions bedevils relief efforts. “Even if trucks are marked with the Red Cross emblem or the United Nations seal, they are confiscated,” laments Momir Cupara, director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Tuzla. Local militias plaster the Red Cross emblem on trucks carrying weapons; punk-rockers display it as a fashion statement. When a Red Cross truck broke down near Tuzla last week, militiamen carted off 21 tons of food intended for refugees. Last month militiamen at a checkpoint outside Sarajevo made off with a Red Cross Land Rover and a truck loaded with surgical supplies for a field hospital. Relief vehicles sent to Sarajevo by the United Nations and the French aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres also have been hijacked. “Without the right of free passage we are useless,” complains Jacques de Heller, a Red Cross representative in Tuzla.
Some aid officials wonder aloud why they persist in the face of such risks and obstacles. Last week the United Nations announced plans to evacuate 200 peacekeeping troops from Sarajevo; the next day, a mortar shell hit their hotel. Bosnians fear that lawlessness will only increase if international organizations flee to the relative safety of Belgrade. Exhausted refugees stared balefully as a U.N. convoy sped past the overflowing gymnasium in Tuzla last week, en route to yet another round of talks in the former Yugoslav capital. “All they can do is negotiate,” said Mehmed Salkic, “and all we can do is suffer.”
