Mother Prepares 2-Year-Old Son For Horror Of War

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Lying in a dank, cold bomb shelter in April, covering her 2-year-old son's ears so he could sleep despite shuddering explosions overhead, Aida Cerkez decided to plan for his future, just in case.

"My name is Igor. If you find me, please bring me to . . . the following addresses . . . ," begins a note that Cerkez placed shortly afterward inside Igor's penguin-shaped backpack.

The tiny parcel includes two diapers, a can of crackers, juice, a life-insurance policy, 200 German marks and snapshots of Igor with his mother and father. Cerkez jotted brief notes about herself and her ex-husband on the back.

Now, whenever the shelling begins in their neighborhood of this besieged city,Cerkez makes sure Igor has his backpack.

"I thought that if we all get killed, he could survive on his own for 24 hours until someone finds him, because I taught him how to open his crackers," she said.

Many mothers in Sarajevo are making similar contingency arrangements, said Cerkez, because the future seems so uncertain. Residents fear a new assault by Serb nationalist forces who hold the mountains and ridges overlooking Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Although the war has been widely condemned and the United Nations airlifts food and medicine, the outgunned people of Sarajevo have given up hope of Western military intervention.

That realization has caused some anguished second-guessing by parents who did not evacuate their children when they could have.

"I did not want to send Igor away. This is his city. But it has been too long now," said Cerkez, 30, whose face shows the strain of losing two close friends to the war in the past two weeks.

Igor's mother, a Muslim, and his Serbian father are members of the Bosnian defense force. The blond-haired, brown-eyed boy is cared for most days by his maternal grandmother.

During intense shelling in the early weeks of the war, Igor and his mother spent every night in their building's basement with 28 of their neighbors, making a bed on the coal and wood used to heat the furnace. "Igor slept, I didn't," Cerkez recalled.

There were no diapers, and every time a shell exploded above them, Igor would soil his trousers, she said. Food was scarce, and on some days his only meal was a piece of old bread and tea.

"He's forgotten about carrots and green things" and spits them out, she said. One time she crawled 150 feet into a field open to sniper fire in order to pull up some carrots for him.

Although the city is calmer now, danger persists.

Only two weeks ago, when Igor was on a walk in a park with his grandmother, a sniper's bullet "whistled maybe 10 centimeters (4 inches) from Igor. My mother pulled him on the ground and lay on top of him for about 20 minutes," said Cerkez.

Igor stays indoors more now, or plays with a unit of Bosnian soldiers stationed just outside his apartment building.

"One day I came home from work and I found three soldiers trying to diaper him in a car. They said it was their most difficult action in the war," Cerkez said.

The family had a rule never to exhibit fear in front of Igor, and Cerkez credits this with leaving him emotionally healthy despite the madness of war.

The war here broke out after Bosnia's ethnic Serbs and Muslims declared independence Feb. 29. Serbs, who want to retain links with what's left of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, have overrun about two-thirds of the former republic. Bosnia puts the number of war dead at 7,500. Unofficial estimates run up to 40,000.

Cerkez believes the war for a united, ethnically mixed Bosnia is Igor's war, too.

"Because Igor is a child from a mixed marriage, his only solution is a Bosnia where all groups - Serbs, Muslims and Croats - would be equal," she said. "He wouldn't be home in any (ethnic) canton."

Serb nationalists consider children of mixed marriages to be "bastards," Cerkez said.

Although Igor has a lingering cold that Cerkez blames on a lack of vitamins, she says he is OK.

"I think Igor is a lucky kid," she said. "He still has his home. He still has some food. He is one of the luckiest 2-year-olds left in this city."