Mostar: Nearly Out Of Medicine, Food And Hope

MOSTAR, Bosnia - About 20 feet outside the public kitchen run by Canka Fazlagic, a young man was on his way to pick up lunch yesterday when a Croat sniper shot him in the mouth. He died minutes later. His cup and pail rolled about the street, making noises in the hot wind.

Mustafa Buric's death is just one of the tragedies of Mostar, a town 50 miles southwest of Sarajevo where Croat guns on the western side of the Neretva River are blasting the Muslim enclave on the eastern side.

The town's improvised hospital functions in the basement of a turn-of-the-century laboratory. It is running out of medicine.

Last Saturday, in the hospital's main operating theater, an 8-by-10-foot room, a surgeon wearing flip-flops tried to save a Muslim man who had been forced by Croat fighters to walk across a front line between the warring sides. Someone had shot him in the head and the back.

In another room, Selma Handzar looked like a mangled doll in a junkyard who had lost her right arm. The 9-year-old squinted out at the world from a face covered with tiny red craters. The wounds on her legs also cut deep, and her doctors fear she might lose another limb. There was blood on her sheets and a teddy bear with a yellow nose on her pillow.

Her brother Mirza, 7, lay next to her, holding her hand. An unwieldy bandage dwarfed his bony right leg.

"If I leave Mostar will I walk on my own legs?" the little boy asked.

Trapped between Croats, Serbs

Fazlagic, meanwhile, worried about how she'd continue to feed the thousands trapped here. She is running out of flour, beans and rice. The last cooking oil was used last week. There is neither meat nor greens.

"I have three days left. With army goods, maybe 10 days," she said, opening the door to a service elevator that serves as a storage room. There, 15 100-pound sacks of flour, rice and beans lay in a space that had once held many more.

Fazlagic's kitchen serves 3,000 people one meal a day on the east bank of Mostar, where anywhere from 30,000 to 55,000 people, mostly Muslims, have been trapped by a Croat blockade since early June. For most of her patrons, it is the only meal they get each day.

If they walk to Croat lines 800 yards to the west, where food is plentiful and beer is cheap, they are exposed to Croat snipers in positions in the hills. If they trudge to Serb lines, up precipitous mountains two miles to the east, to gaze at the full markets there, they again are in danger of losing their lives.

Alliance gave way to fighting

For most of the 16-month communal war in Bosnia, the Muslims and Croats had maintained a tactical alliance against the better-armed Serbs. But after a peace plan collapsed in May, Bosnia's factions leaped to take military control over chunks of territory. When Muslim-led Bosnian government forces attacked Croat towns in central Bosnia, the two groups began a ferocious battle around Mostar.

The Croat blockade has prevented all aid from getting into the old city for nine weeks, except for a symbolic U.N. delivery last Saturday when a delegation brought about 20 small boxes of medical supplies but no food.

Fazlagic smirked at the efforts of the United Nations. The main U.N. aid depot for all of the former Yugoslav republics is located in Metkovic, Croatia, 25 miles south of Mostar. "If they can't drive this little way to give us a little food, it's obvious they can't do much," she said.

The only solution, Fazlagic argued, "comes from the sky."

"We want the Americans to save us and send us parachutes of food," she said.

Fazlagic's plea was echoed yesterday by Mustafa Isovic, the deputy commander of the Muslim-led Bosnian army's 4th Corps, which is based in Mostar. "We need American airdrops," he said. "We are really in great need of food."

The United States is leading an allied operation that already is dropping food to several Muslim communities. The airdrops, while extremely expensive, have been credited with saving thousands of lives. A spokesman for the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia confirmed that airdrops to Mostar are now under consideration.

Isovic said his command had already picked out several sites near Bijelo Polje, a forested area a few miles north of Mostar. Bijelo Polje can be shelled by both Croats and Serbs, Islovic said, "but maybe it's better to die by shelling than of hunger."

"I have the impression that both Europe and the world are watching on TV what we are doing here as if we are gladiators in some kind of arena," Isovic said. "When Europeans feel that someone will fall down, that we will not be able to endure it, they give us some food so we can fight again."