Service a matter of honor

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - The first snow of February fell the night before. Graves crowded in the small cemetery are layered in white. The hard ground is slippery, and Dr. Suad Trebinjac must negotiate carefully across the mounds of snow.

He finds the name he is looking for - Vahid Maric, 1993 - in plastic letters on a brown, coffin-shaped plank upright in the soil.

The thin, pale man holds out his arms and opens his palms to the overcast sky, offering a Muslim prayer for his twin sister's husband.

Mr. Maric was killed by a sniper. "Each family has lost somebody," says Dr. Trebinjac, 40, whose sister, Alma Maric, is now a refugee in Cincinnati with his parents and nieces. "This is common in Sarajevo these days. He was a very good man, very intelligent."

Like most Sarajevans, Dr. Trebinjac has weathered much in this war. He took the worst that the fighting had to give: bombings, starvation, freezing cold and loss of relatives.

During almost four years of war, the doctor worked around the clock to help wounded civilians and soldiers. Many other professionals, especially doctors, fled during the war, but Dr. Trebinjac stayed with his family.

Slight, with thinning hair, a scruffy beard and glasses, Dr. Trebinjac never picked up a gun, but he is deemed a war hero by many in the city. Former patients constantly stop him to shake his hand.

"I considered it a question of honor, of duty to help the survival of my people," says the soft-spoken doctor. "I couldn't go."

His sister, now settled with their parents and her daughters in Westwood, has been urging him to leave Sarajevo ever since she fled in early 1994.

"I want Suad to come here, to be safe," Alma Maric said several weeks ago in her apartment. "But he is a stubborn man. He kept telling me it was his duty to stay."

But with fighting stopped, the war hero wants to leave. He has contacted medical institutions in Cincinnati about sponsoring him, his wife Amela and their 4-year-old daughter, Lamija. What changed the mind of this patriotic Bosnian and devout Muslim was the future.

"I have worked hard for my people all this war," Dr. Trebinjac says. "But my obligation now is to my family and my own life. I am convinced that if I stay here, my wife and child will never have a normal life. No one is going to take care of them but me."

The Bosnian diaspora

Thousands have settled in the United States. Others have moved to Germany, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. With the fighting halted, few show signs of returning. In fact, a growing number of Sarajevans who survived the war now talk of leaving.

"Doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals, many have gone away during the greatest crises in Bosnia's history," said Bosnian journalist Enver Demirovic. "They fled Sarajevo for their own reasons. But when they leave, it hurts every Bosnian who stays." During the war, some Bosnian Serb leaders said their goal was to drive the Muslims from Sarajevo. While the war did not achieve that objective, its aftermath might.

Prospects for life in Sarajevo look bleak for at least 10 years. Peace is by no means assured. Most Sarajevans think the war will resume again. And even if peace holds, reconstruction of the country's infrastructure would cost billions of dollars.

Besides simply repairing roads and bridges, there is enormous work to be done. The countryside is covered with as many as 6 million land mines. Many factories were destroyed by fighting or sabotage.

In Sarajevo alone, public engineers estimate that of 136,000 housing units, 73,400 are damaged.

Tens of thousands in Sarajevo, including Dr. Trebinjac, now live in apartments abandoned by others. If those refugees start to return, many will be out in the street.

Unemployment is so high the Bosnian government can't even figure out what percentage of the population isn't working. Energo Valve Co., a major international trading company in the former Yugoslavia, employed 30,000 people; its operations have shut down. Unis, another major company in the city, had two huge office towers for thousands of white collar workers; today the buildings are shells.

The Bosnian government is broke - so poor it pays its soldiers partly with scrip and cigarettes. Despite offers of long-term aid from the West, little has arrived. "The future is completely unsure," Dr. Trebinjac says.

For Dr. Trebinjac, emigrating to the United States will be hard. He knows he is not marching toward a new life but abandoning the wreckage of an old one.

"During this war, we didn't live - it was just survival," he says. "The war took everything from us in Sarajevo, and now we have to start from scratch."

Before the war, Dr. Trebinjac and his wife lived in a modern apartment in Ilidza, near the Sarajevo airport. There, they had their daughter, Lamija.

His sister, a pediatrician, lived in another apartment complex with her husband and two daughters. His parents lived in a nice but small apartment in Mejtas, an old neighborhood downtown. The close-knit family saw each other often.

"Actually, we lived without any problems," Dr. Trebinjac says. "But we thought we had it bad because we lived under Communism and socialism. Looking at it now, we were in fact happy."

The troubles

Before the war, the 1991 Yugoslav census reported 28,973 Muslims, 25,061 Serbs and 6,914 Croats living in Dr. Trebinjac's neighborhood of Ilidza.

Then, in April 1992, fighting started in full force in the Bosnian capital, with Serb militia and Bosnian police warring in the streets and civilians scrambling to get out of the way. Within two days fighting, almost every Muslim family was forced to flee.

Dr. Trebinjac lost all of his property. His wife and 10-month-old baby daughter fled to Libya to live with a relative; the doctor decided to stay and help Sarajevo. He lived with his parents and Alma's family in the small Mejtas flat.

"This was the terrible part of the war for me because I had no communication with my wife and child," Dr. Trebinjac says. "This has been a life full of tragedy for us. Not the shelling or the sniping or the starvation, it was the separation of families."

His parents' apartment was hit by sniper bullets. A rocket crashed through the bedroom window of the apartment below, owned by his aunt. The hospital where he and Alma worked, Kosevo, was constantly bombed and on several occasions, patients were killed in their hospital beds.

Money became another problem. None of the doctors was paid during the war. In the crowded apartment, water and electricity were cut off. People pulled up park benches and sawed the branches off trees for firewood, and to this day, few benches in Sarajevo have slats.

The worst tragedy for the family came in August 1993. Vahid Maric, Alma's 44-year-old husband, was killed by a sniper while digging trenches for the Bosnian government. When the family buried Vahid, Bosnian Serb gunners fired on the funeral party. No one was injured.

After Vahid's death, Alma decided to leave the city. Just before the war, she had planned to go to Cincinnati for advanced medical training at University Hospital. With the help of a humanitarian organization, she got out.

At the same time, Dr. Trebinjac snuck out of the city, too, to go to Libya and bring his wife and child back to Sarajevo. When he saw his daughter, then 2 years old, the little girl said, "Mother, who is this man in our house?"

"Can you imagine how that felt?" Dr. Trebinjac said. "What do you say to her? That was the greatest pain of the war for me."

Dr. Trebinjac came back to Sarajevo with his family. He withstood the pain of the last four years because it was the war, he believed, for the survival of his people and city.

"This was war, and you have to accept that people die and there are many hardships," he said. "But now, I believe the fighting has stopped - and I must look for my own future."

Constant worries

"I have never met the man, but if he comes back, he can have his flat back," Dr. Trebinjac said. "But then the government has to find a flat for me and my family."

Dr. Trebinjac holds down four jobs. He works at the hospital rehabilitation clinic, at the university as a teaching assistant, at a military hospital,and at Oxfam - a world hunger organization. He makes about $500 a month, most of it coming from Oxfam; his military service earns him about $18 a month, plus some cigarettes. His wife trades the cigarettes in the market for food, which is a little more expensive than in Cincinnati.

Dr. Trebinjac constantly worries about the safety of his daughter. She has spent two years huddled in this apartment building. Snipers hit the windows several times. Only just recently have they taken the child for walks in the streets. He would like more children, but to have a child in Bosnia right now would be crazy.

His parents fled the city last year to Cincinnati. His mother developed a severe case of cirrhosis of the liver, caused by the poor diet in the war, and Alma got their mother the medical treatment she needed. She is now doing fine. And both parents, father aged 71 and mother 66, are studying English.

His sister, in weekly phone calls, has told him about a beautiful new mosque built north of Cincinnati, of computers, advanced medical equipment, good schools, educational opportunities and, most of all, peace.

By comparison, Sarajevo can offer only hardship for himself and his family, Dr. Trebinjac feels. He was there when his people needed him, and spent years in war caring for the lives of other Bosnians.

Now, he wants to care for his own life. Now, after two centuries in Sarajevo, the Trebinjac family is leaving to rebuild along the Ohio River. They leave behind painful memories and a snow-covered grave.

"I gave much to my city," Dr. Trebinjac says as he walks away from where his brother-in-law lies. "My conscience is clear."

Published Feb. 11, 1996