Bosnia's Children: Their Horrors, As Well As Their Hopes

----------------------------------------------------------- OVER THE LAST 14 MONTHS, Bosnian Serb troops have occupied about 70 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina, unleashing a sort of triangle of mayhem in which Bosnian Muslims have gotten the worst from Croats and Bosnian Serbs.

Beyond the reports of atrocities and the 138,000 dead or missing from all sides is this: More than 2 million people left homeless. The majority have ended up in the homes of friends or relatives, but thousands more have landed in refugee camps or hospitals where the conditions vary from bad to worse.

Among them are thousands of children. Many adapt well, others barely hang on. As a generation, they are Bosnia's future. -----------------------------------------------------------

Nisveta, 17: Idolizes the Clintons. A year ago, Nisveta Delic was a teenager with a room of her own and a passion for "Twin Peaks" reruns. Today, she's coming of age in an overcrowded barracks packed with about 700 other Bosnian Muslim refugees in the Croatian town of Varrazdin, an hour's drive northeast of Zagreb.

It was last summer when Bosnian Serbs took the city of Prijedor, tossing hundreds of Muslims into prison camps and putting tens of thousands of others to flight. Nisveta's father, a road worker, landed in the prison camp at Trnopolje. He was eventually released, but then the family had to raise money to buy their way out of occupied territory. It wasn't until February that they arrived in Varrazdin.

Nisveta misses everything from Prijedor. Her best friend from Prijedor was raped by soldiers and attempted suicide. Her classmates are among the dead. She misses her high school, her favorite coffee bars, the Hammer videos she watched on MTV.

When her father was in prison, it was Nisveta, and not her mother, who mustered the courage to see him. There she stumbled across an execution in progress and saw the "wall of blood" that haunts her still. Remembering that makes her cry, but so does bidding farewell to a group of Canadian relief workers she has known less than a week. By now, she has said goodbye to so many important things in her life that she can't stand leaving even little ones behind.

Still, she wants to travel the world, and loves all things American. She has taped magazine pictures of Bill Clinton over her bed, risking the wrath of her roommates (who are still looking for a U.S. president who will come through for Bosnian Muslims).

"Maybe one day," she says, "I will be president of Bosnia and Hillary Clinton will call me for dinner." Her parents, as much as they admire her strength, look at her as if they can't imagine where she came from.

But it's OK, everything's OK, Nisveta assures herself aloud and often as she holds her stomach after a particularly unsavory meal; as she holds her nose against the stench of the latrine; as she window-shops in town wearing donated clothing; as she clutches a stuffed animal and waits atop her bunk for the adults to quit arguing politics and turn off the light.

These nights, she dreams less about men dripping in blood and more about Arsson, the young man she met in Trnopolje. He made it out of Bosnia, to a job on the Croatian coast; he visits on the weekends. As this summer began, Nisveta was awaiting papers that would allow her and Arsson to go to Sweden, where they plan to get married. If the papers come through, she will leave what she calls "my Bosnia" still farther behind.

Alma, 11: The family pillar. With her blond, blue-eyed good looks, sharp tongue and dazzling smile, Alma Smajic could be the queen of Stobrec, a less-than-regal quarter near the Croatian city of Split.

When Alma talks, children listen. Where she walks, they follow. When word comes that, after a year in the camp, the refugee children will be able to attend class in a hotel a mile away, it is Alma who leads a handful of children along the beach. And once inside, at her desk, it is also Alma whose eyes are brightest when the teacher addresses her for the first time.

She also drinks coffee with her elders, forages for the finest donated clothing and somehow scores a key to the one hot-water shower in the place. In the food line, she is all business, juggling loaves of bread, packages of butter and a pot of beans. When the butter falls to the ground and the pot burns her arm, she is, for one brief moment, a crying child once again.

If her family were back in Foca, near Sarajevo, she would be a schoolgirl. But Serbs drove Muslims out of the town 16 months ago, and she, her brother and their mother landed in Stobrec, a refugee camp of tents and Italian-made trailers. Her father, who says he has psychological problems that make him unfit for military service, slips in and out of the camp. Alma has become, in ways that would have been unthinkable before, a decision-maker for the family.

A few months ago, a visiting U.S. couple took a shine to Alma and offered to sponsor her family for resettlement in the United States. Alma's mother shows a snapshot of a veritable mansion in the Midwest, the couple's home. "But Alma said no," says the mother, "so we didn't go."

Suad, 11: Orphaned twice. At the Kosevo Hospital in Sarajevo, a skinny boy with big eyes is crying so hard his whole body shakes. He clutches at the wall, trying to stop, but can't.

Outside, a dozen other boys and girls also are weeping.

The boy is Suad Samardzic, an orphan who shared a room at the city orphanage with a young soldier named Miroslav Dobric. Today, the soldier was killed in battle.

When Suad heard that Dobric had been wounded, he and the other orphans set off to walk across town to the hospital. His older brother, who has protected him since their parents died, forbade it.

Suad instead ran away. Miroslav, the soldier, "was the best guy in the orphanage," he said. "I don't know how to explain it."

Suad is wracked by sobs once more, uncontrollably. "He was my best friend," he said.

Ivana, 10; Biljana, 15: Different ways of coping. The Ristovic sisters daily watched their father leave their Sarajevo home to dash through grenades and gunfire to find milk for baby brother Marco; eventually the father was wounded in both legs. That hasn't kept him from having to fight for the Bosnian government somewhere on the front line. The family does not know if he's alive.

For Ivana, the war has turned her inward. Though they've escaped to Belgrade, she writes poetry as a way to exorcise the pain of watching the city she loved disintegrate, for the loss of friends she can no longer play with. She often hides under a table to write her poems about peace and freedom.

Biljana looks at her brother and smiles. She talks about the future and how, even though she is an outcast at her new school, she intends to once again be the best pupil in class.

"When I dream, I dream of going back to our apartment and taking my books with me," Biljana says. "I used to know everybody. I would go out with my friends. We loved to play Frisbee."

It's Biljana's determination, her infectious smile and dancing eyes that provide the encouragement and hope for the family, says their mother, Marija Ristovic.

"When I say it's my destiny to" have no future or home in Sarajevo, she says, "Biljana says it is not so."

To get more information, or to help refugees seeking to relocate to the U.S., contact:

-- The nonsectarian International Rescue Committee, which administers the processing office for refugees in Croatia seeking to resettle here. Regional Director Bob Johnson, 318 First Ave. S., Seattle 98104. 623-2105.

-- Washington Refugee Resettlement, 233 Sixth Ave. N., Suite 110, Seattle 98109

Material from USA Today is included in this report.

------------------- LATEST DEVELOPMENTS -------------------

-- A day after Bosnia's president agreed to an ethnic partition of the country, a cease-fire took hold yesterday. The United Nations says overall the cease-fire was holding up well, but confirmed intense Muslim-Croat fighting around one town.

-- Bargaining over the boundaries of the partition continued in Geneva yesterday. International mediators reportedly were pushing Serbs to agree that isolated Muslim-held areas in eastern Bosnia should form part of a Muslim republic and be linked to it by a land corridor.

-- At Washington's request, NATO officials will meet in Brussels, Belgium, tomorrow to discuss the use of air power in Bosnia. A Clinton administration source said participants would discuss how air strikes might be used to break the sieges of Sarajevo and other cities.

Associated Press