From: de2j@poe.acc
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia,soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: UPI Newsfeature
Date: 7 Oct 92 13:53:02 GMT
Organization: UVa

Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 19:08:07 PDT

 
	UPI
 
	SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Hercegovina (UPI) -- On any given day at the bombed-
out state hospital, doctors may face several dozen shrapnel injuries,
close a half-dozen bullet wounds and perhaps amputate three or four
limbs.
	But for each torn-open leg or blown-away arm bleeding onto the cots
of the ground-floor emergency unit, Dr. Mirza Cisic, a
neuropsychiatrist, says he and his staff, squeezed into a tiny third-
floor office, handle more than twice as many injuries to the mind.
	``The surgeons are doing the physical work, and we have to save the
brain and the soul,'' said his colleague, Dr. Momir Smitran, sitting
with Cisic and wearing a white lab coat. ``And that is a lot more work.''
	The dozen or so people sitting quietly in the dark, bomb-scarred
hallway outside their office are but a small part of the problem.
	For outside the office, where residents of Sarajevo still survive the
daily rain of artillery shells and random sniper attacks, doctors feel
the number of such victims is at least 10 times as great.
	``Generally speaking, we must say there is no family in Sarajevo that
has not been damaged or destroyed psychologically,'' Cisic said.
	The doctors offer both individual and group therapy, but they lack
normal diagnostic and basic rehabilatative tools, such as videotapes of
prosthesis patients designed to give hope to those who just lost limbs.
	But thousands of those needing treatment, including those with pre-
existing mental problems, simply never find help.
	``They feel the situation is hopeless, with not much chance that it
will be improved,'' Cisic said. ``They do not come and report here
because this place is always under grenade and sniper fire.''
	Cisic, who is old enough to recall World War II, sees little
comparison even to wartime London or Dresden because those cities were
not cut off from the outside world and the aerial blitzes at least came
with some warning.
	``This is six months of daily shelling,'' he said.
	``Here you just walk down the street and suddenly a shell is falling
on you,'' Smitran said. ``When there is an air alert, it does not get
any attention -- people just keep walking on the street.''
	``Now (the city) is one big concentration camp,'' Cisic said. ``The
inhabitants are in a hopeless situation, not only for their vital living
functions, but because their existence remains in doubt.
	``I personally don't know what to bring my family, how to feed them.''
	Perhaps ironically, one release from the tension could be found in
the impish grin and beaming brown eyes of 40-year-old Nermin Tulic,
sitting on a cot tucked away in the darkness of an elevator waiting area
a couple floors below the psychiatrists' office. Tulic, a well-known
Shakespearean actor in the city, was standing outside his home June 10
when a mortar grenade fell from the sky and exploded between his legs.
	He said his doctors tried everything to save at least one of the
legs, but could not.
	``I thought of suicide -- they took the knives and forks away from me
-- I was trying to die,'' Tulic said, playfully wiggling his scarred
stumps beneath an unbuttoned pink shirt.
	``But then when I put in perspective what is behind me and what is in
front of me,'' he said, recalling the sudden change of heart he had
about two months ago. ``I thought that I have a girl 14 months old, that
my wife is pregnant -- she had another girl just 40 days ago -- and that
with good rehabilitation -- I can expect to resume about 80 percent of my
activities.''
	Tulic said the turning point came when, after days of struggling, he
finally learned the trick of sitting up straight without his legs.
	``At that point a micro-switch flipped in my brain, and I did in one
night what some people take two weeks to do,'' he said.
	Tulic rejected any thought of bearing hatred for the rest of his life
 ``because I will never meet the man, the animal, the beast who shot
this grenade.''
	Cisic and Smitran, perhaps better than anyone else in the city,
understand the psychological as well as military warfare being waged by
Serbian forces against the civilian population, but are no better able
to comprehend why.
	``They are the most sadistic, psychopathic type of violations,''
Cisic said, doubting he could even give a professional recommendation
that those shooting the guns from the hills above Sarajevo could be held
legally responsible.
	``It would be an understatement to say these are people with
diminished capacity. And in a normal process, they couldn't even be
prosecuted,'' he said. ``They would be put in an asylum.''
	Early in the Bosnian phase of the Yugoslav conflict the Serbs opened
the doors of a Sarajevo asylum for non-criminal patients, Cisic said.
More than 100 residents were evicted, some wearing only their pajamas.
	Some of the patients have been returned to hospitals for treatment,
he said. Others are believed among those still walking the streets.
Xref: sparky soc.culture.yugoslavia:9049 soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna:278