Rumor & Reality

By Bruce W. Nelan

For those who live there, Bosnia is a child's worst nightmare, a land where horror is the custom. Fathers disappear. Friends die. Neighbors flee. Food is short, bombs fall and suffering is a way of life. The familiar names of cities and towns have turned into symbols of destruction, siege, massacre, "ethnic cleansing."

The stories of savagery have come to define life in what was Yugoslavia. Whether they are fact or fiction is almost irrelevant: what people think is happening determines behavior. Serbs say that they fear the imminent imposition of a scourging fundamentalist Islamic regime in the heart of Europe, and that they must defend themselves however they may. Muslims tell tales of castration and execution at the hands of Serbs, justifying their imprisonment or expulsion from the small enclaves they still control. The very fear of brutality has set off a huge exodus of Bosnia-Herzegovina's population in search of safety. "Emotions, not rationality, have the upper hand," says Francois Heisbourg, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Not all the stories are true. But even if truth is the first casualty in every war, more than enough is real about the horrors in Bosnia. Some of the atrocity stories are exaggerated and some of the numbers of victims inflated, but the evidence of inhumanity and brutality on a staggering scale is there for everyone to see.

As they moved through the hinterlands of the former Yugoslavia last week, TIME correspondents found believable evidence everywhere. In the northern village of Trnopolje they visited the "Fraternity" elementary school that Serb militia forces have turned into a detention camp for 4,000 people, mostly Muslim men. Half the captives live outdoors in makeshift lean-tos; they all ^ get the same dirty water and use the same three toilets. One inmate, Hajudin Zubovic, a 28-year-old miner, told how a dozen or more prisoners at a ceramics factory in the area had been forced to stand in the sun all afternoon on July 24 and Serbian guards beat 10 of them to death, then fired rifles into a room filled with more than 150 men. Says Zubovic: "Thirteen hundred of us heard their screams."

Now safe in Croatia, Marijana, 17, stuttered out the terrible events of last April. After raping her and her mother, Serb irregulars carried Marijana off to a camp in the forest, where she and a group of other women were raped repeatedly over several weeks. They finally freed her when she became pregnant; she vows, "I will not give birth." But her doctor says she is in her 20th week and an abortion is out of the question. No one at the hospital has been brave enough to tell her that.

Outside the police station in the northwest town of Prijedor, dozens of Muslims stood in line to apply for permission to leave. As in most Serb-held territory, the departing can get exit papers only in exchange for signing a document relinquishing all claim to their property and possessions. Serb police chief Simo Drljaca gloated that none of the 9,000 Muslims he says applied to leave wanted to remain in the mayhem that is Bosnia.

Their supposedly voluntary flight is the cynical point of the madness that has enveloped the country. The overwhelming, all-pervasive terror, made more frightening by its random cruelty, has a clear objective: uprooting the Muslim and Croat population in what has been called ethnic cleansing, a scheme to turn large chunks of Bosnia into purely Serbian territory. The apparently casual destruction Serbs have inflicted on towns and cities with artillery bombardment, including the capital of Sarajevo, is notification to the occupants to leave. Serbian radio brazenly delivered that message last week to 70,000 residents of Bihac, warning that shelling would not stop until every one of them agreed to depart. Snipers firing on civilian shoppers and mortar shells dropped on the market have made the same point. Serbian forces have issued a countrywide eviction order, which they have followed up by seizing at least two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Political scientists call such a policy the rational use of terror -- that is, making a population tractable through constant fear. The stomach-turning atrocity tales swirling through Bosnia -- regardless of whether they are true or false -- serve that purpose. Though they blacken Serbia's name internationally, they fuel the panic and despair that has swept over Bosnians as they tell stories of the latest horrors to one another. They were ready to believe all of them -- and many of them were true. "Terror has deep roots," says Heisbourg. "There has been too much of it for people to return to normal life even if the chance arises."

Nor is the cleared-earth policy an exclusively Serbian practice. Croatian forces have jumped into the fight, occupying almost one-third of Bosnia, expelling the Muslims and Serbs living there. And Muslim Slavs, left with only four small segments of the country, have also tried to oust Serbs and Croats. "No one's hands are clean in this dreadful war," says Jens Bjorsten, a field officer for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.). "All have done horrible things."

The International Committee of the Red Cross abandoned its posture of studied discretion last week and issued a blanket indictment. After visiting camps run by Serbs, Croats and Muslims, it found that "innocent civilians" are being held in inhumane conditions by all of them, part of "a policy of forced population transfers carried out on a massive scale and marked by systematic use of brutality," including "harassment, murder, confiscation of property, deportation and the taking of hostages." The U.N. Human Rights Commission appointed a special investigator to assemble evidence of atrocities and build a record for a possible future war-crimes trial.

But in the surreal world of Bosnia, Serbs met this torrent of international opprobrium with little more than a shrug. They point the finger at others to defend their own actions. "We realize that the state of our prisons is not ideal," said Dragan Kalinic, who claims to be health minister of the Serb- controlled area of Bosnia. "But we shouldn't have any illusions on the state of the prisons of the Muslims and the Croats." Foreign journalists arriving in Banja Luka to visit nearby detention camps are shown a 15-minute video showing bodies -- purportedly those of Serbs -- that have been shot, stabbed, castrated, extensively mutilated.

The Serbs have constructed their own version of reality to justify their aggression. "There is no ethnic cleansing," said Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, "but ethnic shifting. We are doing it to protect people." They have conjured up a phantom Islamic jihad from which they are saving Europe. ( "This is not a civil war," insists Prijedor police chief Drljaca. "It's a religious war." The operative lie is that Bosnia's Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, is bent on creating a Muslim fundamentalist state. Never mind that Bosnia's Muslims are not fundamentalist, indeed are among the more secular followers of the Prophet Muhammad. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, who shares the Serb ambition to carve up Bosnia, parrots the charge that "there are tendencies to create an Islamic state." Serbs claim that an "Islamic Declaration" that Izetbegovic wrote in the 1970s is proof of his intention to establish a religious state. "There was nothing in it," says Ivo Banac, a Croat who is a professor of history at Yale University, "that alluded in any sense to Bosnia-Herzegovina."

That hardly matters if the threat works. The excuse has allowed Serbs and Croats to turn on the Muslims with such ferocity that many Muslims now conspire in their own flight. So too do international officials, who have been put in the excruciating position of aiding the evacuation of endangered Muslims -- and thereby abetting ethnic cleansing. The Serbs agreed to safe passage for 300 women and children from Sarajevo last week for humanitarian reasons, for public relations advantage, though relief officials believe their motive was really to depopulate the city. In northern Bosnia, Serbs announced a plan to push 28,000 Muslims from towns in the region, after the U.N. aided the expulsion of 7,000 Muslims into Croatia a week before. This time the U.N. has decided to ward off a mass exodus by sending in food and medicine. Said U.N.H.C.R. operations director Tony Land in Zagreb: "We can't allow ourselves to be drawn into this kind of unwitting collaboration."

While the world was recoiling in shock from the visible inhumanity, Western reaction was more rhetorical than real. Under pressure to do something -- anything -- the U.N. Security Council passed a vague resolution that provided for "all measures necessary" to ensure delivery of relief supplies. Observers could be forgiven if they somehow got the idea that the U.N. had authorized the use of force to stop the war and end the barbarities. That was hardly the case. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger spelled it out carefully: "What we are talking about is the provision of humanitarian assistance. We are not talking about going beyond that."

A NATO contingency plan calling for 100,000 alliance troops to hold a land corridor from the Adriatic coast was rejected last week. Britain's Deputy Foreign Minister Douglas Hogg flew to Sarajevo to tell Bosnian President Izetbegovic "that there is no cavalry coming over the hill, that there is no international force coming."

Western governments seem to hope the mere threat of force will scare off combatants who have shown no signs of responding to international dictums. The nominal admission of inspection teams to some detention camps last week was little more than a shell game in which cleaned-up camps were opened to outsiders while prisoners were hustled away to other facilities far from prying eyes.

The ultimate reality may be that the war is virtually over and the Serbs have won."We have everything," declared Serb leader Karadzic last week. "All we need now is a negotiated settlement." The Serb irregulars know how hard it will be for any international body to reclaim what they have taken. And regardless of the political outcome, the war has already done damage that cannot be settled at any peace table. A new chapter of resentment and reprisal has already been written that promises to keep the Balkans unstable for decades. People who have seen their parents slaughtered and their children killed will never forget, let alone forgive.

With reporting by James L. Graff/Trnopolje, John Moody/Zagreb and William Mader/London