CRUSHED HOPES

By KEVIN FEDARKO AND ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER

On the first afternoon of the recent offensive in which the Bosnian government massed more than 15,000 soldiers and began pushing against the Serbian lines near Sarajevo, the people of the city huddled in their apartments and waited. Some listened to explosions from the battlefields. Others attended to their battery-run radios. For hours the state-controlled media gave no information. Then at 3 p.m., listeners received the news: the government forces were advancing. All Sarajevo seemed to lift with joy. Radios were placed on windowsills so that music could fill the streets. Bottles of brandy were brought out for toasts. Days before, a weekly newspaper had run the headline THE ARMY WILL BREAK THE SARAJEVO BLOCKADE IN 24 HOURS. Now the government had advanced, and with tears in her eyes 43-year-old Senada Hukovic cried out, "We are winning! Dear God, please let it be true!"

But it was not. The offensive petered out last week, and the buoyant hopes of the Sarajevans crashed to earth. In a matter of days, they had experienced an almost unbearable sequence of despair, euphoria and finally the immensely disheartening realization that it would take far more than a single battle to free their city from the Serbs' embrace. The story of Sarajevo in that period shows a city at the breaking point, bent cruelly back and forth.

When the last cease-fire in Bosnia ended on May 1, a period of relative peace that had graced Sarajevo for four months was shattered as the Serbs resumed shelling without letup. As a result, at the time the Bosnian offensive started, the city was experiencing one of its most dispiriting moments since the war began in 1992. Many roads into town had been closed. The airlift, by which half the city's food supplies are delivered, had been suspended for nine weeks. The Serbs had shut off all gas, electricity and running water.

Civil society in Sarajevo had all but disappeared. With most cafes closed, people could no longer engage in the city's favorite pastime, sipping Turkish coffee and arguing. Eating was a dull affair, enlivened only by combining U.N. food packages in inventive ways. (The recipe for one popular preparation, "brains": fry onions in oil, then combine sour yeast and bread crumbs.) Spring had arrived, but children had given up playing volleyball, football and their nameless street games. Many shops were closed, and those that remained open were poorly stocked.

Life was reduced to the daily alternation between huddling in dark apartments and standing in line for hours to fill water containers, which would then be carted home in baby carriages, wheelchairs and trolleys. The war interfered with every act, even one as innocuous as looking out the window; most glass panes were shattered months ago and have been replaced by opaque plastic sheets.

Then on June 16 came the Bosnian army's apparent bid to break the iron ring of Serb artillery that has encircled the city for more than three years. The first reports were of success, and elation overtook even those whose experience seemed to warrant it least. "Victory is ours!" exclaimed Mehmet Gluhic, a worker at Sarajevo's morgue, who tended to 28 bodies the day the offensive started and to 12 the next day. "There will be as many victims as God wishes, but we have proved that we are capable of breaking the resistance of our enemies."

Said Binasa Sijercic, a nurse at the city's Kosevo hospital: "We have always lived in hope, but now I think freedom is just around the corner." Mirsad Curevac, a 31-year-old soldier, shouted, "We are winning!" On the first day of the offensive, he was a patient in the hospital when a Serb shell crashed through the room, severing the head of one patient and slicing the body of another in two. Even with his own head and hands bandaged from the blast, Curevac could not wait to rejoin his unit at the front, convinced that the Bosnian army was about to give the Serbs a thrashing. "They won't be able to do this for much longer," he declared confidently.

By the beginning of last week, however, it had become all too clear that the offensive had slowed to a virtual standstill. As fighting in the mountains outside the city bogged down, the Bosnian government claimed that its objective had not, in fact, been to lift the blockade. Rather, it was announced, the operation had only a few modest goals: to cut several Serb supply routes, gain some strategic positions and keep Serb troops busy so that they would find it difficult to reinforce other units. "It's a limited-scope offensive," said Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic. "We cannot lift the siege."

Not only can the Bosnian government not lift the siege, but the situation of Sarajevo today is even more dire than before. Last week the United Nations abandoned altogether its 16-month effort to shield the city from Serbian bombardment. By Monday U.N. forces had withdrawn from the 10 depots originally established to collect and control the Serbian cannons, howitzers, tanks and artillery pieces that were used to bombard the city. Moreover, it now appears that despite protestations it would never do so, the U.N. had in fact made a deal in which it agreed, among other things, not to conduct air strikes against the Serbs if they released the remaining U.N. peacekeepers they were holding hostage. To obtain the hostages' freedom, the U.N. traded away the only deterrent to which the Serbs have ever responded--NATO air strikes. For example, the heavy-weapons "exclusion zone" extending 12 miles around the city was enforced by the threat of air strikes. Now the Serbs seem to be free to bomb the city at will, without fear of retaliation.

As it became clear that the prospect of liberation was an illusion, residents of Sarajevo found their optimism choked off. Hope, like everything else inside the city, now needs to be rationed carefully; overindulging only makes the want of it more keen. Last Wednesday afternoon about 50 people were on the street in the suburb of Dobrinja. The day was sunny, and many were digging in the makeshift vegetable gardens that Sarajevans have taken to cultivating in whatever scrap of dirt they can find. Suddenly, a Serb shell lanced in, killing six people. "The Serbs always like to catch us at such moments," said Nenad Tupajic, 26, a soldier who was patrolling the Dobrinja line. "That's their way of taking revenge."

One of those wounded was Zuhra Poturak, 25, an economics technician whose husband was killed during the first summer of the war. In 1993 she was hit by a machine-gun round and went into a coma for two months. When she awoke, she could not speak and had lost control of the right side of her body. During the weeks of painful recuperation, Poturak sustained herself with a single vision: she wanted to take her young son for a walk in the neighborhood and, without having to be afraid of mortars or snipers, board a tram. When Wednesday's shell sent a piece of shrapnel into her right thigh, Poturak realized that Sarajevo has become a place where wishes as simple as hers are extravagant. Her sentiments are now the despairing antithesis of those expressed by so many Sarajevans only days before. "I don't think our army will ever liberate us," she said. "It is impossible. There is no way to free Sarajevo."

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Kiseljak

With reporting by MASSIMO CALABRESI/KISELJAK