"Cleansed" Wound

By LARA MARLOWE KOZARAC

SIX SERB MILITIAMEN FROM BOSNIA lounged on deck chairs and sofas on the unkempt lawn of what was a Muslim home in Kozarac. The former owners had been swept out at the end of May. Now, rifles at their feet, the fighters smoked cigarettes as they leafed through comics and pornographic magazines. Dragan Zamaklaar, 22, in jeans and cowboy boots, dragged heavily on a Marlboro. Then he began to cry.

"I feel nothing for the Muslims who lived in the house we have taken," he said, weeping for his own family. "Muslims moved into our old home in Kladusa. They killed my uncle last spring. How would you feel if you saw Muslims slit your uncle's throat, if you saw them throw Serb women and old people out of windows?"

This kind of talk is commonplace in the wide swath of land Serb gunmen have seized in Bosnia by dispossessing local Muslims and Croats. Far from hiding the results of large-scale "ethnic cleansing," the Serbs seem to feel fully justified in taking over what is left behind. Like so many former Yugoslavs, Zamaklaar learned hatred -- not compassion -- from the past. Yet his flight from his family home in northwestern Bosnia, where Muslims have so far managed to hold a small pocket of territory, to the "cleansed" town of Kozarac has brought him no happiness.

"The house we built in Kladusa had 10 rooms and a basement," he said. "But now six of us live in a Muslim's house with only four rooms. How would I know what happened to the Muslims who lived in it? Their name was Fazlic. That's all I know. They left some furniture, and we found a few of their family snapshots. I didn't even bother to look at them."

In the northwest Bosnian village of Kozarac, 50 miles from their hometown, life is hard for Zamaklaar's mother, father, grandmother, sister and brother. They have no income, and local Serbian dinar notes, one of three currencies circulating in Bosnia, are all but worthless. "They don't know anybody here. They just sit in the house all day and think about what happened to them," said Zamaklaar.

The "purification" of Muslims from these towns and villages in northwestern Bosnia has proved a hollow victory for the Serbs, destroying prosperity as well as security. All supplies must be trucked in from Belgrade, along a corridor often under fire from Croatian artillery. Residents complain of food shortages. There is no gasoline; most travel by bicycle and horse- drawn cart. People do not know how they will heat their homes as winter approaches.

Before the Bosnian war, Prijedor, a town of 30,000 six miles from Kozarac, was a busy industrial center. Now its rail yards are silent. The lumber mills, food-processing plants and iron mines have shut down. Schools will not open this fall. The Serbian militia provides almost the only employment.

When darkness falls, the remaining residents, mostly Serbs, retreat into their homes, respecting the 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. Distant artillery fire rumbles through the night. And the militiamen drink. Humanitarian groups receive frequent reports of inebriated Serbs searching out and murdering any remaining Muslims they can find.

The Serbs around Kozarac express little remorse for the countless Muslim homes they have destroyed and tens of thousands of lives they have shattered in "cleansing" northwestern Bosnia. Their main interest now is in improving their own living conditions in the territory they have taken. Serbian officials told a visiting Western delegation last week that if the Muslim government in Sarajevo wanted peace, it would first have to reopen the roads, railroads and air space and restore the telephone and electricity lines it has cut off. "If we don't have electricity, if we don't have fuel," said Milan Covacevic, a social-planning official in Prijedor, "not only will we continue fighting, but we will all become cannibals."

In the green meadows and pine forests around Kozarac and Prijedor, stands of poplars, apple and plum orchards, haystacks and fields of unharvested corn and sunflowers evoke a peaceful pastoral dream. But along the road to Prijedor, a burned-out house suddenly appears around a bend. Then more follow, and more, maybe a thousand in all, relics of two-story, white-washed villas with broken red tile roofs. Windows are smashed, walls blackened by smoke. There are no shrapnel and bullet holes recording some battle here; this is what "ethnic cleansing" looks like a day or even an hour later. Laundry still hangs on clotheslines, a sign of how quickly disaster fell upon the inhabitants. Only one house remains intact, the home of a Serb couple who sit drinking their morning coffee on the balcony, their mattresses airing in the sunshine.

"Cleansing" was even more thorough in Kozarac, once a prosperous Muslim community of 22,000. In Bosnia the Serbs farmed the countryside and the Muslims earned higher wages working in the town factories. Many of the Muslims of Kozarac had gone as guest workers to Germany and come home years later to build well-furnished villas that provoked the envy of their Serb neighbors. Muslim survivors tell how the Serbian militia came with trucks to round up women and children last May; their location is still unknown. The next day the Serbs returned to loot the Muslims' tractors, cows, cars and furniture. Survivors say more than 5,000 men were beaten to death or shot when they tried to defend their homes. The Serbs dynamited the houses, so no Muslims could ever return. They even ordered the Muslims to fly white flags from their windows, so militiamen would know which houses to destroy.

^ Some of the Muslim men trucked out of Kozarac still live in famished misery less than a mile away in makeshift tents at the Trnopolje camp, supposedly under the "protection" of Serbian irregulars. They can see the minaret of the Kozarac mosque down the road and are sometimes allowed to pick fruit from the gardens of their destroyed homes. When they venture out, they see Serb newcomers from Muslim-held areas watching them from the windows and doorways of the few Muslim dwellings still standing.

"Kozarac is not a safe place yet," admitted Milomir Stakic, the new Serbian mayor of Prijedor. He took the place of his democratically elected Muslim predecessor when Serbian forces began brutally "cleansing" the area last spring. His statements were the first confirmation that Muslim guerrillas are operating in the area. "Last night two Serbs were killed and their bodies were burned in Kozarac," he acknowledged. "Groups of Muslim extremists have withdrawn to the Kozara mountains. They could hide there for another six months, even a year."

During World War II, 100,000 German troops were unable to dislodge Serb fighters from the local mountains. Yet Stakic, like other Serbian officials, failed to see the irony of this role reversal, or of the Serbs' use of the Nazi term ethnic cleansing. He insisted the Serbs were only uprooting Muslim "extremists" when they ravaged Kozarac. Look at Cela, he said, a nearby village of 1,200 Muslims and 500 Serbs where both are living in model harmony.

But Muslim villagers in Cela tell a different story, not of harmony but of terror. First a lamb was stolen during weapons searches. Then 15 men were taken away for "interrogation"; only 14 returned. Another man was sent to the Serb-run mountain prison camp at Manjaca. Drunken militiamen set fire to the mosque, killed an old Muslim man and dumped his body down a well.

Cowed by the intimidation, the Cela Muslims tried appeasement. "We made a deal with the Serbian authorities," said a village leader. "We fly white flags on our houses as a sign of our loyalty. We will not oppose them, and they will not harm us. So far, they have kept their word, but we don't know about the future." Meantime, they try to lead normal lives, harvesting their plums to sell to Serb neighbors for making slivovitz. Though most are afraid to leave the village, a few brave souls carry food each day to the men at the Trnopolje camp.

There is not even that semblance of normality in the village of Celinac, some miles farther south. The hamlet is officially off-limits to all outsiders. A decree issued by the Celinac municipality gives the Muslim population a "special status" similar to that of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. All Muslims must observe a 4 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew. Muslims are "not allowed to stay in the street, in restaurants and other public places." Muslims are forbidden to swim in the rivers, to fish or hunt, to use or drive motor vehicles, to be in groups of more than three, to use telecommunications facilities except for a post-office telephone, to sell real estate or exchange apartments without a special authorization. The order includes a list of 34 Muslim citizens of Celinac who are not allowed to talk to their neighbors or leave their houses.

Back in the garden at Kozarac, the fighters with Dragan Zamaklaar shrugged off the plunder and dispossession. "Of course there are robberies -- this is war," explained one. The Serbs may chafe at the isolation brought on by a war of their own making, but they are not about to reverse the evil of "ethnic cleansing." There is little chance that the Muslims of Kozarac or Prijedor or two-thirds of Bosnia will ever go home, and the consequences of their dispossession will haunt Europe for years to come.