March 19, 1996

Fiery Farewell as Bosnian Area Changes Hands

By CHRIS HEDGES

ARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- A group of ragged Bosnian Serb police officers, their voices barely audible over a scratchy recording of the old anthem of the kingdom of Yugoslavia and the thunder of ammunition exploding nearby, lined up for a formal farewell to the neighborhood they will hand over to the Muslim-Croat federation on Tuesday.

The police officers lowered the Bosnian Serb flag from the front of the Grbavica police station, kissed the cloth and folded it. Milenko Karisik, deputy interior minister for the Bosnian Serbs, proclaimed the officers "heroes" and reminded the few onlookers that the police were the first to raise the rebel Serbian flag in the suburb four years ago.

"We saved this area militarily but we lost it at Dayton," he said, referring to the talks there last year.

"Maybe this generation of Serbs won't come back, but in future generations the Serbs will return," he added.

The roaring fires in buildings, punctuated by exploding ammunition, the bands of drunken thugs cruising the streets in cars without license plates, and the fear etched on the faces of elderly people who peered through the plastic sheeting nailed across their window frames illustrated that whatever authority these police officers had wielded disintegrated days ago.

This Serbian-held Sarajevo neighborhood is the last scheduled to be turned over to the federation. Tuesday is also the deadline for the two former warring factions to withdraw more than half a mile from the former front lines.

As NATO officials blasted the Serbs for failing to stop the arson and looting in Grbavica, they also warned the Muslim-led Bosnian army that it had 24 hours to vacate the main barracks and other military installations in central Sarajevo.

Maj. Simon Haselock, a spokesman for the NATO force, told reporters Monday that the peacekeepers had the right to enforce the Bosnian government troop withdrawal.

But for now all eyes were on the streets of Grbavica. More than a dozen fires sent billows of smoke and flames into a gray, overcast sky. Italian troops, who gunned their armored personnel carriers swiftly through the debris-strewn roads, arrested at least three suspected arsonists and turned them over to the Bosnian Serb police, who promptly released them.

All but a few thousand of the approximately 60,000 Bosnian Serbs from the five neighborhoods and suburbs that had been scheduled to be turned over to the federation fled. Many of them lived for four years just yards from the front lines, and they see the decision to give up the neighborhoods as a defeat.

The repeated explosions Monday apparently came from ammunition and grenades arsonists planted inside the buildings they were burning. While some of the people behind the fires were vandals, others destroyed their own homes. An elderly Serbian couple who did not want to be identified were driven out of their apartment when a neighbor set his apartment alight, setting off explosions.

"What is happening now makes the thought of the Muslims coming here a relief," said the woman, fighting back tears. "We tried so hard to save our apartment. It was all we had in the world."

"People are burning their houses because they are bitter and angry," said Milorad Katic, the mayor of Grbavica. "They don't want to leave their houses for the Muslims to inhabit."

Most of the 2,000 or so Serbs who remained locked the doors of their buildings and barricaded themselves inside their apartments.

When one elderly woman unlocked the front door of her building Monday afternoon to let in a man who lived there, he brushed her aside and began to dump gasoline in the hallway. She ran desperately outside to find some Italian soldiers who rushed in and prevented the man from starting a fire.

But many were unlucky. Two women tried to toss basins of water up at a fire on a floor above them, but had to flee as the fire spread.

"We struggled for so long, we endured so much over the last four years," said one woman, "and now we are burned out by our own people."