From: victor@jezebel.wustl.edu (Victor Wickerhauser)
Subject: Refugees describe Serbian death trains
Organization: Washington University, St. Louis Mo.
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 18:16:31 GMT


[ from the Hartford Courant, 7/23/92, p.1]

Refugees describe Serbian death trains

by Roy Gutman, Newsday

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina --- In their zeal to "cleanse" northern Bosnia
of its Muslims and Croats, Serbs who seized control of the region have
deported thousands of unarmed civilians in sealed freight trains in the past
month.

Hundreds of women, children, and old people have been packed into each
freight car for sweltering journeys lasting three or more days into central
Bosnia, said refugees who survived the ordeal.

"There was no food, no water, no fresh air," said Began Fazlip.  "There was
no toilet, just holes in the floor," which piled high with excrement.  An
unknown number of people, particularly children and the aged, have died in
the deportations, according to first-person accounts.  You could only see the
hands of the people in the tiny ventilation holes," said an official of the
SDA, the Muslim political party.  "But we were not allowed to come close.
It was like the Jews being deported to Auschwitz."

Today, Muslim community leaders said, there are no Muslims left in any of the
major towns of northwest Bosnia, where they had made up as much as 90% of the
population. 

The method of deportation was confirmed by Stojan Zupljanin, the police chief
in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Hercegovina's second-biggest city and the stronghold of
ethnic Serbs in Bosnia.  "We arranged 'safe transportation'"  for Muslims
who, he said, wanted to emigrate.

With more than a million Bosnians made homeless by the Serb assault,
passenger trains full of deportees are waiting at the borders of what was
formerly Yugoslavia for willing host countries.  But movements within
northern Bosnia have been almost exclusively in sealed freight trains, Muslim
officials said.

According to eyewitnesses, the first two trains, carrying about 4000
deportees from the town of Kozarac, passed through Banja Luka around June 12.
Some were transported in passenger cars, but the majority rode in cattle
cars.

Even the people in the passenger cars looked exhausted and were in terrible
shape.  But the guards allowed no one to communicate with them,"  said an
official of Merhamet, the respected Muslim charity in Banja Luka, who also
witnessed the first trains.  Both the Merhamet and SDA sources are now in
physical danger, and their names are not being used.

Since June 12, Muslim officials said, freight trains packed with deportees
have moved through Banja Luka regularly, but during a nighttime curfew, when
no citizens are allowed near the station.

A spokeswoman for the International Red Cross said last week that the
organization had heard rumors of deportations in sealed freight cars, but had
been unable to confirm them.  

Zupljanin painted a rosy picture of the deportation, suggesting that elderly
men, mothers with infants and small children had asked to be deported in a
way that violates international conventions protecting civilians in wartime.

Zupljanin asserted that the trains had been organized because "a certain
number of [Muslim and Croat] citizens had expressed their wish to move to
central Bosnia."  He implied that the refugees were happy to be carries in
cattle cars.

"None of the refugees asked for first-class carriages,"  he said.  "None of
them said 'If you don't have a passenger train, I wouldn't go.'  Anything is
better than walking."  He indicated that the alternative was a forced march
of up to 100 miles.

Asked why police would not allow Muslim volunteers to provide food and water
to the refugees, Zupljanin said only: "It was a safety measure."

In fact, local Serbs, who seized power and declared autonomy last spring
without consulting Muslims and Croats in the region, drove them at gunpoint
out of villages and towns where their families had lived for centuries, many
refugees say.

The Muslims were in the way of a strategic goal extreme Serbian nationalists
have promoted for years, the creation of a corridor between the republic of
Serbia and Krajina, an isolated pocket of Serbs in the middle of Croatia.
thanks to an enormous military assault by the Yugoslav army, that corridor is
now a fact, the central military achievement of three months of war.

Refugees from northern Bosnia and Muslim officials in Banja Luka said the
Serb-controlled army launched direct assaults using artillery, mortar, and
tanks against nearly every town or large village.

Local police militias rounded up non-Serbs, transported them in trucks and
buses to sports halls, schools and stadiums, and ordered them aboard the
freight trains.  The police chief confirmed that two freight trains carrying
those expelled passed through Banja Luka about one month ago, but he said
he could not recall any subsequent movements.  But a local Red Cross official
said that  he was aware of other "evacuations" by trains involving Muslims
and Croats from the towns of Bosanski Novi and Prijedor.

According to Merhamet and the SDA, through the middle of last week there were
at least 10 trains in the past month with at least 100 cars.  They estimated
that at least 20,000 people were deported in this manner.

"A friend of mine went to the station to look for relatives on the train,"
said a longtime resident of Banja Luka.  "She couldn't find them but she
found some of their neighbors.  She came back sobbing.  She said that the
people looked pale and exhausted and afraid.  Some were still dressed in
their nightgowns."

The world community and international relief groups have condemned ethnic
cleansing as a barbarous practice that also has produced Europe's largest
refugee flood since World War II.

----
Prof. M. Victor Wickerhauser (314)935-6771  <victor@jezebel.wustl.edu>
Dept. of Mathematics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO  63130  USA

Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia