Flight of Terror

By MICHAEL MONTGOMERY TUZLA

WHAT PASSING BELLS FOR those who die as cattle? Or for those who escape the slaughterhouse. They arrived packed into open-topped trucks, the lucky ones crushed painfully against the cold steel sides yet able to gulp down the winter air as the convoy of refugees crawled its way from the front-line Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica to the relative safety of Tuzla. The unlucky ones -- five small children and two women -- died on the journey, their lives pressed out in the tight huddle of frightened humanity.

"They were alive when we passed Edrinjaca," sobbed Hanifa Hajdarovic, whose two children, Senija, 5, and Senad, a babe in arms, did not survive the harrowing, eight-hour passage through Serb lines. "But there was a jolt. I was knocked down, and my children were both crushed. We thought we would be safe if we left Srebrenica."

The United Nations rescue convoys were well meant. But twice last week as the trucks lined up in Srebrenica to take on board their pathetic cargo, survival instincts got the better of a panic-stricken populace. Desperate to escape the encircled city where 60,000 Muslims have been trapped by the Bosnian Serb offensive, they stormed the transports. At least four, probably more, died in the stampedes and harried U.N. officials, already accused of abetting the Serb aim of ethnic cleansing by evacuating Muslims, called off further convoys until new security measures could be put in place.

Dazed refugees who arrived in Tuzla spoke of the hellish conditions of the journey, with as many as 180 people packed into trucks designed to carry sacks of food. Some admitted to bribing army commanders to get on; others fought for places, pushing aside those too weak to retaliate. A little boy who survived a fall from one of the trucks en route ran screaming alongside the roaring convoy until a Serb army major hoisted him back on board. "When you see the refugees you only have to imagine what it's like for the people inside," said Simon Mardel, a British doctor who has witnessed the hunger and disease of Srebrenica. "They are fighting for their lives to get out."

Inside a Tuzla sports hall being used to house the evacuees, Merima Sinanovic, a small 20-year-old woman, sits quietly. Her soft blue eyes are set in a face etched with pain and grief. After Serb nationalists sacked her hometown of Vlasenica early in the war, killing her parents, she and her three young brothers roamed the forests in search of food and shelter. "We learned to survive from the old people who had lived through the Second World War," she explains. "They told us how to cook tree buds into a kind of bread. They were surprised by this war. They said the last war wasn't anything like this one. They said there was a lot more butchery in this one."

When word came of a possible evacuation, Merima and her brothers trekked through the snow to Srebrenica. "We slept on the street around fires for five days," she says, showing her blackened palms as proof. They managed to procure some food aid parachuted out of U.S. airplanes by rushing to the drop sites with thousands of other hungry refugees. But that soon ran out. "For the past three days we didn't eat anything. It was like we were in the forests again except we were in a town, in front of U.N. soldiers."

As the first U.N. trucks finally lumbered into Srebrenica, Merima and her brothers slept close by to assure themselves a spot. Now safe in Tuzla, Merima studied a sandwich and an orange that have been plopped into her soot-stained hands by an aid worker, not quite sure whether to admire them or eat them. Her brothers puzzle over jars of British baby food. "We haven't seen such things in almost a whole year -- chocolate, oranges, real bread," says Merima. "We've been living in a different world. Before the war we wouldn't even think about bread. Now it's all we think about." She eats her orange. It is a blood orange, and the red juice stains her blackened hands.