On The Road of White Death

By JAMES L. GRAFF GORAZDE

Shelling, starvation, endurance, hope: these are the only commodities to be had in the besieged enclave of Gorazde. How long can the city hold on?

If it depends on the determination of the residents alone, Gorazde might never fall to the Serbian guns that have surrounded the 232-sq.-mi. pocket for 10 months. For 70,000 people, a murderous route over the mountains is their only lifeline. Night after night, they come to an isolated valley in eastern Bosnia, where authorities stockpile 110-lb. flour sacks and sometimes canisters of cooking oil. One evening last week, 400 people loaded all they could into rucksacks and onto the backs of 60 ponies, and trudged off on the dangerous trek back across the snowy mountains -- the only way in or out of Gorazde.

As darkness fell, the silent, shuffling black forms snaked up the mountainside for 10 numbing hours, then staggered down the icy and perilous descent. An uncupped cigarette was enough to draw fire from Serbian positions ( along the route. Alija Slivo, 60, who spent five months in Serbian captivity in the town of Foca, was ready for an ambush. "I'll blow myself up before I get caught by the Serbs again," he said, pulling a hand grenade from the pocket of his tattered gray jacket. Sometimes the trek is called off altogether when Bosnian security forces find pressure mines or booby traps on the unmarked trail -- but dozens have died from those they missed.

Even more perilous than the gunfire is what the Bosnians call bijela smrt, the creeping "white death" that comes when exhaustion leads to sleep in the snow and thence to death. Ramiz Bezdrob, a 66-year-old house painter, succumbed on the night of Feb. 27 trying to bring in food for his wife and five children. Four days later, other trekkers carried his emaciated body, his nostrils still plugged with ice, off the mountain on a primitive bier of branches. At least 50 people have frozen to death along the 26-mile route. Some of their bodies and those of fallen pack ponies are visible along the eerie moonlit trail; spring will reveal the rest.

The meager supplies have kept the besieged alive -- barely -- amid the ruins of their city. Intensive shelling has left few roofs and windows intact. Rockets still regularly slam into the streets, but Gorazde's citizens are holding firm. They hope that help is coming. But so far, the C-130 transport planes droning over Gorazde have been destined for others. "The mountain trail can satisfy only 5% of our needs," says Gorazde Mayor Hadzo Efendic. And the airdrop? "The world has attached much pomp to that," he says, "but it is of no use to us."

Some of the women refugees packed into a schoolhouse have received only soup made of bread, oil and water for weeks; they lie on their blankets all day long. At 105, Fatima Malokos has suffered through all of Yugoslavia's 20th century wars. "In World War I they only fought, in the second they only burned some houses," she says. "In this one they just shell civilians. This one is the worst."

The misery breeds solidarity, even with Serbs. Dusanka Lazavic, 51, a Serb, saw the Bosnian police drag her husband away in June as a suspected sniper; she figures he is dead by now. Yet she stood in line last week at a food- distribution center with her Bosnian Muslim neighbors. Like them, she gets two half-slices of bread for elderly relatives. "We share every piece of bread, every cigarette," she says. "But we're all reaching the point where we can't go on much longer."