If Balkan horror is condoned, the question is, `Who's next?'

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

They are freezing to death.

Old people in a home on the outskirts of Sarajevo, wrapped in sweaters and coats and blankets, shiver in their beds, their hands and feet black from frostbite, waiting to die. They have been without heat, electricity, water and food for months.

Outside the home, the temperature is zero, so cold, the New York Times reported Wednesday, "that dogs and cats scavenging for food among the discarded plastic packs of American military rations scampered for the indoors each time somebody opened the home's only useable entrance, on the side away from the snipers."

Snipers. Killing cold. Hunger. Dark. How easily everything can fall apart. Civilization and its trappings are veneer. Cut off the gas supply and what good are cars and stoves? Dynamite the electrical lines and what good are lights and generators?

Wealth, position, fame mean nothing when it comes to survival.

Arm the bad guys with bombs and guns, then look the other way while they take control. Let them do whatever they want - torture, rape, loot and murder - and the house of cards that is law and order falls apart.

The old people freezing and starving in Sarajevo are no different from old people in nursing homes around this country. They have families. They have histories. They never thought they would end up as they have. They could be our mothers and fathers. They could be us.

"On the morning that the people of Sarajevo marked the beginning of their 10th month under siege, 10 of the 118 residents ... had died in two days," the Times reported.

"The dead included three men and seven women and their deaths brought to 190 the number of residents who lived at the home when the siege began who are now dead."

Of the 190 who have died since last March, 17 were murdered by snipers. All the rest froze or starved to death.

Sarajevo used to be a jewel of a city. In 1984 it hosted the Winter Olympics. It was vibrant, teeming, thriving.

Now it is dying, screaming in agony, begging for help. But the world has turned a deaf ear.

In September, before the winter cold added to the torture of people trapped in this living hell, the Times told another story, not of an old woman but of a young one. Fikreta Hadzovic was a pretty girl of 19 when she moved in 1986 from her small country home to Sarajevo.

"The city, with all the new cafes and discos that had opened for the Olympics, was an exciting place for a Slav Muslim country girl," the Times said.

Hadzovic got a job in a department store and was living the life millions of young women the world over live in big cities.

Until the war started.

The store closed so she found a job as a cook. But one day last summer on her way to buy milk, she was hit by shrapnel from a Serbian mortar. A surgeon, to save her life, removed her left leg above the knee and her right leg below the knee.

Now she waits in a military hospital with hundreds of other amputees all maimed by snipers as they were walking to work, as they were standing in their kitchens, as they were lying in hospital beds recovering from other wounds. She waits for the siege to end and the war to stop so that she can get medical help.

"More than 300 of them need treatment abroad," the president of the Committee for Health and Social Security of Bosnia and Herzegovina said last September.

Four months later, they are still waiting.

Suppose this slaughter were happening in London or in Venice or in Rome? Would the world be so passive? Would the United States be so silent?

Last week, Newsweek reported yet another Serb atrocity - the rape and torture of 50,000 Muslim women.

And still the diplomats keep talking.

Last summer the United Nations predicted that 400,000 Bosnians could die this winter from a combination of hunger and cold. The bodies of 10 old men and women, bound in blankets, loaded on a truck and driven to a cemetery, don't make a dent in this number.

But they represent them all. Imagine them, look into their faces, feel the thin, weak grasp of their fingers. Then look at a globe and ask yourself: If the world continues to tolerate this, which city and which people will be next?