February 26, 1996

Some Serbs Choose to Stay Near Sarajevo

By STEPHEN KINZER

OGOSCA, Bosnia-Herzgovina -- For nearly half a century, Vlado Koprivica has been a friendly and hard-working but thoroughly unremarkable resident of this Sarajevo suburb. Now he is suddenly someone very rare: a Serb who is staying.

Thousands of Koprivica's neighbors fled their homes in panic in the last few days, terrified of the horrors they thought they would face when Vogosca's Serb authorities were replaced by new ones from the Muslim-dominated government. Government police officers who arrived on Friday found empty houses and apartments, empty shops and markets, empty clinics, and schools.

Lurid broadcasts on Bosnian Serb radio and television convinced most of Vogosca's Serbs that long treks over snowy mountains toward refugee camps were preferable to life under non-Serbian rule. But Koprivica, 70, with white hair and a glowing smile, did not succumb to fear.

"Propaganda scares people," he said on Sunday in his sunny apartment near the center of town. "A lot of people would have stayed, but they were told they were going to be killed. I told them: 'You have something here. This is your ancestors' land. You won't find anything better.' But they were too afraid."

"The war spoiled everything," he lamented. "We could have lived together for a thousand years. We used to have wedding parties together. There was never a problem. My neighbor across the hall was a Muslim, and both my neighbors upstairs were Muslim. We were like a family. I might have been afraid of criminals and gangs, but I was never afraid of my neighbors."

As Koprivica spoke, one of his former Muslim neighbors, Esad Avdic, who now lives in Sarajevo, was poking through the ruins of the apartment upstairs where he lived until Serbs forced him and the rest of the town's Muslims to leave in 1992. He plans to clean it up and move back with his family.

"I feel so sorry that this happened," Avdic said. "We shouldn't have had this war at all. It was a big mistake. It was forced on us. We didn't hate, but politicians made us hate."

A few hundred of Vogosca's Serbs have decided, like Koprivica, to stay and see what the future holds rather than believe the warnings of their leaders. Most are elderly or infirm, but a few are young and vigorous. One of them is a 44-year-old man who was born here and has lived here all his life. He asked not to be identified by name.

"I think for myself, and I don't follow anyone else," he said on Sunday afternoon. "I'm interested in what kind of man you are, not what your religion is."

"Ten or 15 people who are getting ready to leave came up to me today," he said. "I asked them, 'What are you afraid of?' They said they are afraid that Muslims from other parts of the country will come and murder them. They are afraid of the new police. But the fear is all in their own heads. I only become afraid when there is a reason."

Under provisions of the peace accord reached last year near Dayton, Ohio, government police officers in Vogosca are supposed to patrol only under the supervision of United Nations monitors. They are not supposed to conduct identity checks or maintain checkpoints on adjacent roads. But they have broken all these rules, feeding the fears of the few Serbs who remain.

One of the town's new administrators, Esad Cerimagic, who comes from a Muslim family but is a self-proclaimed atheist, scoffed at complaints that the new police force is overstepping its rights under the peace accord.

"The are just looking for bombs and explosives, making sure the town is safe for people who want to come back," Cerimagic asserted. "If we take a sign off a wall, the Serbs consider it an incident. But all the people who were killed in Srebrenica while the U.N was watching, and the Serbs' refusal to allow outsiders into Srebrenica for six months, that is not considered an incident."

Srebrenica, a Bosnian city designated a safe area by the United Nations, was captured by the Bosnian Serb army last summer.

Cerimagic's family brought him to Vogosca in 1950, when he was a young boy, and he lived here until 1992, when four armed Serbs, including one who was the son of a close family friend, ordered him out. Married to a Serbian woman, he felt trapped between the militance of President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and that of the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic.

"Nationalism is a very dangerous thing," he said. "If I had listened to Alija and Karadzic, I would have had to divorce my wife and abandon my two children."

Remaining Serbs who want to leave Vogosca and other Sarajevo suburbs that are to come under government control in the next four weeks, will not have to suffer the travails that confronted thousands who fled last week. NATO commanders here have agreed to allow the Bosnian Serb army to send trucks to the suburbs to pick them up.

Until now, international agencies had refused to help people fleeing Bosnian towns where the authorities from one ethnic group were replacing those from another group. To do so, they maintained, would be to aid the process of ethnic segregation that is turning this once-heterogeneous country into three ethnic enclaves.

A senior NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Rayner, sought to defend the new policy at a press briefing on Sunday.

"We are not facilitating the move," he said. "Since it's going to happen, it's going to happen in an orderly way."

At the same briefing, a spokesman for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, Kris Janowski, was asked if he accepted that line of reasoning. After a pause, he replied: "I would not comment on that."