Sheri Fink: War Hospital

“Young man,” she said, “you’re the 918th candidate to show up here. You’d better try somewhere else since we only accept 200 students.”

Ilijaz had no time to try somewhere else. He had to meet his friends and return to Gladovići. In a couple of weeks, he would be leaving for his required year of army service.

“Just take these documents,” he insisted, “and let’s try.”

On his way out, Ilijaz bought books to prepare himself for the entrance examination. He went home and closeted himself in his house to study. Days later, he achieved the highest possible score on the examination and was admitted to Sarajevo medical school. On July 5, 1983, he went to enroll, and the following day he left for the army.

He found military service a waste of time, though he proved himself a wit with Morse code and learned, battling seasickness in a ship’s radiotelegraph room, that he could perform his job in the face of physical distress. After serving out his year, Ilijaz started medical school. He had a layman’s distaste for the “ugly” things in medicine, and the goriness of anatomy, pathology, and forensic medicine classes allayed his initial enthusiasm for a career in surgery. By graduation in December 1989, he was ready to forsake blood and gore and enter a field like pediatrics—the nurses could give injections, not him!

Not long before, eastern Bosnia’s villagers had buzzed with excitement when one of their own, Ejub Alić, finished medical school and went to work with the city folk in Srebrenica. It wasn’t a common occurrence for a peasant to become a professional, and Ilijaz Pilav’s parents had taken note. Now they, too, could boast as their son followed in Ejub’s footsteps, beginning work as a general practitioner in the Srebrenica health clinic.

Ilijaz took a bachelor pad apartment in a town just north of Srebrenica called Bratunac. Each morning he drove south down a straight, paved road into Srebrenica. Just past the town’s entrance he turned his car up the steep driveway of the hospital and health clinic. On the left the rectangular, three-story hospital building loomed over the road, its whitewashed and brown-tiled exterior framed by hills. Before it a polelike evergreen stood a lonely guard, its branches blooming high on its trunk like petals atop a delicate stem.

To the right of the hospital sat the squat, orange brick-covered health clinic where Ilijaz worked. People frequently took breaks to smoke and talk on the steps of its verandah. Josip Broz “Tito” had died a decade previously, but no one had the heart to remove a giant poster of the adored leader from the lobby window. “Comrade Tito,” read the front page of a Srebrenica newspaper, reporting his death, “we swear to you that we will not turn off your road.” The eyes in his magnified head stared vaguely in the direction of Bratunac.

From the clinic’s porch, Ilijaz had a view of Srebrenica’s main street, the square PTT—post-telephone-telegraph—building and the town’s only gas station. Noisy little cars drove by, and, when the weather was fair, men clad in blue jeans and women dressed in skirts and light summer blouses strolled past. Some older women wore kerchiefs on their heads and the patterned bloomers, called dimije , of Muslim villagers. They sauntered with the relaxed posture of people who could predict the contour of every inch of road in the small city and who recognized just about everyone who passed.

Once every hour, as cars zoomed by, hammers clanked, and buzz saws buzzed at the construction site of a new school, bells chimed from the white Orthodox church overlooking the town from a hill. The deep clanging “ding, dong-dong” set roosters crowing and dogs barking. Five times a day, praises of Allah spun out of the loudspeakers atop Srebrenica’s five minarets to join the cacophony.

Organized health care in Srebrenica stretched at least as far back as the late nineteenth century when the area—then backward and unindustrialized—came under the governance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians mapped the area, developed its forestry industry, paved its main road, and, knowing that Srebrenica had been a mining town in medieval times (its current name means silver, its Latin name was “Argentaria,” and in the Middle Ages it was the most prosperous inland town in all of the western Balkans), explored its mineral resources. They erected a one-story hospital to serve a large area of villages along the Drina River. Most of its physicians and nurses came from neighboring Serbia. During World War I, Srebrenica’s reputed healing waters, known since Roman times and analyzed by the Austrians, were used to treat injured soldiers. The waters were bottled for export and a spa was built. After the war, health tourists thronged into Srebrenica for physician-administered bathing treatments in the waters of the medicinal springs on the far southern end of town.

During World War II, Srebrenica and the surrounding villages of Muslims and Serbs switched hands frequently between forces loyal to royalist Serb Chetniks, communist Partisans, fascist Croat Ustashe and their allies, Muslim Handžars. Acts of violence took place, even near the hospital, but locals also saved one another. In 1942, Ustashe authorities interned 3,000 Serbs from the district of Srebrenica in the hospital vicinity, but local Muslims intervened to prevent their execution. In 1943, as part of widespread massacres and killings by Ustashe in revenge for a Partisan attempt to take the area, two Muslim nurses were killed near the hospital. Srebrenica was liberated by the pan-Yugoslavist Partisans late in the war, on March 11, 1945, which came to be celebrated as liberation day. Srebrenica’s health clinic was named after a Partisan leader, Dr. Asim Čemerlić, a Muslim physician who had helped protect local Serbs.

During the post-war years, the area remained backward and underdeveloped. Most of the hospital workers still came from Serbia. The area had more Muslims than Serbs, and only a few Croats. However, until the 1960s, aside from Čemerlić, one of the only other non-Serb hospital workers was a Croatian doctor who had served as a military physician for the fascist Croatian forces. After the war, he was sentenced to a long prison term, but a politician decided he would be more useful in a hospital than a jail, and his “punishment,” instead, was being sent to work in the backwater of Srebrenica.

In the late 1960s a young doctor from the Srebrenica area, Sabit Begić, became one of the first locally born Muslim physicians in Srebrenica. He made a name for himself treating workers at a nearby lead-zinc mine in Sase, where roughly a third of workers were on sick leave every day due to lung ailments. In the early 1970s, Begić led a campaign to encourage local children to go into nursing and established small health clinics in the neighboring villages, including the one where he treated young Ilijaz’s sore throat. At the time, the Yugoslav government targeted the area’s mining and forestry industries for development and initiated new industrial activities. Battery and car-brake factories were built, a furniture factory, stone-cutting workshop, and textile factory were established, and the area enjoyed an upsurge in tourism at the medicinal spa and in nearby hunting grounds. To create a well-educated workforce, Yugoslavia invested in the education system, turning Srebrenica high school into one of the best in Bosnia.

Local companies, enjoying prosperous times, donated money for equipment, vehicles, and even apartments for physicians. Srebrenica’s squat health clinic was built next to the old hospital building and used for general medicine, pediatrics, and women’s health services. A separate building adjacent to the clinic served as doctors’ quarters and later came to house an x-ray machine, ultrasound apparatus, and a small diagnostic laboratory. In 1981, the hospital was renovated and two new stories added for gynecology, obstetrics, and internal medicine. At the opposite end of Srebrenica, psychiatrists, rehabilitation specialists, and general practitioners worked at the now-famous Guber spa.