Zepa Refugees Recount Terror of Siege, Flight

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — In the final days before the fall of Zepa, the young and old fled into the hillside forests under cover of darkness. Down below, government soldiers struggled to stand their ground in trenches that shook with the roar of artillery.

Then, the tanks rolled in, and the Bosnian Serb takeover of a second U.N. “safe area” in as many weeks was complete. Their defensive lines broken, the poorly armed soldiers joined the villagers in flight, while civilian leaders negotiated a desperate evacuation.

“There was shelling and artillery, day and night, all the time,” said Enver Omerovic, 20, a soldier whose leg was blown off two days ago as the two-week-long rebel Serb barrage crescendoed. It became impossible to resist further, Omerovic said, grimacing still with the pain.

He was one of the first of 150 wounded soldiers, elderly refugees and children evacuated from Zepa and transported 14 hours to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, where they arrived at dawn Wednesday, some on crutches, others with amputated stumps wrapped in bloody rags.

Their stories provide the first eyewitness account of the fall of Zepa and the “ethnic cleansing” that has followed. Thousands of the enclave’s mostly Muslim people are being expelled from their homes to the government-held cities of Kladanj and Zenica under the auspices of the United Nations.

Soldiers interviewed in their beds at Sarajevo’s Kosevo Hospital said the Serb attackers, besides bombarding Zepa, fired on government positions with tear gas or nerve gas. Then, as they advanced, the refugees said, the Bosnian Serbs set fire to villages and slaughtered farm animals.

Under an agreement brokered personally by Lt. Gen. Rupert Smith, commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, with Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb army chief who was indicted on war crimes charges this week, Zepa’s civilians were coaxed from their forest hiding places, where they had slept in the open or in caves and without food. They were gathered in the town of Zepa and herded onto buses and trucks for removal.

Many of the buses had license plates showing they were from the Yugoslav cities of Novi Sad and Titograd, soldiers said, further evidence that the Serbia of President Slobodan Milosevic, despite claims to the contrary, continues to provide logistic help to the Bosnian Serbs.

Bosnian Serb soldiers surrounding the town shouted insults and threats at wounded government soldiers as they gathered to board buses, said Sadik Ahkmetovic, an army medic who was shot in the thigh during an attack on Zepa’s tiny, thoroughly overwhelmed hospital. “We are going to slit your throats,” they taunted, according to Ahkmetovic.

Still, initial reports indicated that the Bosnian Serbs have not engaged in the same mistreatment and abuse they were accused of after their capture of the safe area of Srebrenica on July 11. In the expulsion there of more than 30,000 Muslim refugees, the nationalist Serbs allegedly committed widespread atrocities, including the rape of women dragged off buses and the summary execution of men.

U.N. officials, wary that the Zepa evacuation could turn ugly, this time ordered more peacekeepers to help monitor the operation. They said Mladic appeared keen to conduct a “less offensive” operation. “It is ‘ethnic cleansing,’ but it is not being conducted as appallingly as in Srebrenica,” said U.N. spokesman Alexander Ivanko.

The fate of males age 18 to 55, however, remained uncertain. Fifteen days after Srebrenica fell, several thousand men remain missing.

For Hasena Kulovac, the terror came in having to leave her husband and 18-year-old son behind. She was evacuated with her 13-year-old son and a daughter, Jasmin, 15. “It was very hard to leave them,” she said, her face contorting in grief. “Only God knows if I will ever see them again.”

Equally terrifying was the chance that something could happen to daughter Jasmin on the trip out of Zepa. A fresh-faced blond with cornflower-blue eyes, Jasmin too had heard stories from Srebrenica; she was scared. The women planned to cover her in a scarf but ultimately gambled that the Bosnian Serbs would not stop the bus, believing it carried only old people.

At Kosevo Hospital, the evacuated seemed exhausted, hungry and battered but not as traumatized as those forced from Srebrenica. Old women in head scarves and layers of full skirts despaired for their families, many of whom are thought dead; a 14-year-old boy lay crying in his bed, straining to lift the stump where his right calf used to be.

Many of the Zepans spoke with bewilderment at how the world had abandoned them. Besir Kurtic, 67, spent days before the fall of Zepa hiding in the mountains and listening to news on a radio powered by a generator for a bicycle light. “As an old man, I was wondering why all the foreign countries cannot make the Serbs stop,” Kurtic said. “You wouldn’t have to beat them or bomb them, just make them stop.”