Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Tuesday, 6 Oct 1992 22:57:27 CDT
From: <U15231@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bosna-herzgvna
Subject: Weapons shortages spurs home-grown arms industry in Sarajevo

Subject: Weapons shortage spurs home-grown arms industry in Sarajevo



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        SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Hercegovina (UPI) -- In a dark, back-alley workshop
thick with the cloying aroma of gun oil, Becir Skrijel remains true to
the centuries-old artisan traditions of Sarajevo.
        But Skrijel does not produce the intricate filigree jewelry, fine
woolen carpets or bright copperwork for which the Bosnian capital gained
reknown throughout the Balkans.
        He makes bombs.
        The bespectacled metalsmith is part of a network of craftsmen
scattered throughout the city who have turned their skills to inventing
and producing homemade munitions for the outgunned defenders of
Sarajevo.
        The weapons reportedly work well. But, they come nowhere close to
compensating for the massive stockpiles of modern military hardware
supplied to encircling Serbian forces by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav
army and communist-ruled Serbia.
        Still, with Bosnia-Hercegovina included under a U.N.-ordered
international ban on weapons sales to the republics of former
Yugoslavia, local arms makers believe theirs is an important
contribution to the war effort.
        Their main sources of explosives are the Serbian artillery, tank and
mortar shells that fail to detonate as they bounce down Sarajevo's
streets or thud into parks and buildings.
        ``We are happy when the aggressor sends us a shell that doesn't
explode,'' said Skrijel, 58. ``There is a unit of experts that collects
them and brings them here.''
        But because Sarajevo's desperate circumstances mandated innovation,
Skrijel has not limited his labors to the conventional.
        His inventions have included Coca-Cola bottle gasoline bombs that
burst on impact after being launched from mortar-like contraptions
powered by automobile suspension springs compressed by foot-operated
levers.
        Skrijel also produces anti-personnel mines loaded with shrapnel the
Serbs themselves blasted into the city.
        And, his longtime hobby of collecting World War II small arms has
served him well in the repair and improvement of vintage arms that
Sarajevo's defenders have been forced to utilize.
        ``I like weapons, but not for killing. I like the mechanisms that
make them work,'' explained Skrijel, who ran a metal-forging and foreign
car repair shop before the war.
        His statement was underscored by the assortment of rifles, machine
guns and pistols lying in various stages of disassembly on a table in
his cluttered workshop in Sarajevo's Muslim Slav-dominated old Turkish
quarter.
        Some weapons date to the end of the last century. Even so, said
Skrijel, all would be cannibalized for spare parts or repaired with
homemade replicas and sent up to the front lines.
        ``Out of 20 old ones, we can make 12 to 15 new ones,'' he said,
holding a German-made Mauser pistol manufactured in 1898. ``This one is
going to be fixed.''
        Among the scattered metal flotsam was most of a 7.9 mm Mauser machine
gun, the bolt embossed with the tiny eagle clutching a swastika in its
talons -- the symbol of Nazi Germany.
        ``This is the best machine gun ever made,'' said Skrijel. ``They are
still using this design for the NATO pact.''
        Also awaiting his ministrations were World War II-era Russian machine
guns, British-produced Stens and Lee Enfields, and a 1935 Italian-made
Beretta machine gun that required a new spring to stop it from firing
when jolted.
        ``Time had its effects and a spring wore out. The owner was running
and he fell. The gun fired by itself and the man in front received three
bullets in his backside. But, he lived,'' recounted Skrijel with a grin.
        Bombs, however, are the main business of Skrijel, his son, and three
assistants.
        Working at top speed, the five each day can produce about 50 of the
rocket-propelled grenades that Skrijel considers the best of the
homemade weapons he has designed.
        ``Our fighters can throw a bomb up to 30 meters. But, the problem is
that the aggressor has tanks and armored cars, and with this method, you
cannot do much harm,'' he explained.
        ``So, we came back here to think about how we could make something
that could go 200 to 300 meters. What we did was weld a small rocket
onto the bottom of an empty grenade before we fill it with TNT.''
        The TNT is obtained from dud shells, which he and his team open by
using a lathe to shave down their steel walls to paper thinness.
        They then tap the shells gently on a block of wood in much the same
way that a cook cracks open an egg.
        The yellow resin-like explosive is pried out in chunks, which the
workmen grind into a powder by rolling it between a pipe and a steel
surface. The powder is then poured into the grenade bodies.
        The final step is inserting a detonator, the fuse of which remains
outside the bomb. The fuse must be lit with matches or a lighter just
before the device is launched from the muzzle of a rifle using a blank
cartridge to ignite the rocket.
        Skrijel said he first learned of the weapons' effectiveness from a
Serbian television broadcast.
        ``They were interviewing a wounded Serbian fighter who said the
Bosnian army was using some secret, but very dangerous equipment,'' he
recounted. ``The fighter said, 'We don't hear it, but it explodes over
our heads. We don't even have time to blink. Probably they are using
something forbidden and imported from the West.'''
        Despite his obvious enthusiasm for his work, Skrijel said he was
anxious to stop producing instruments of death and return to his old
trade.
        ``I was forced to learn this,'' he said sadly. ``Nobody believed that
this could happen to us.''