There Is A Light At The End Of The Tunnel

VREME: After two and a half years as the UNHCR Public Information Officer in Belgrade, what will you tell your friends in Australia when they ask you how it was?

SACHS: I was thinking about this in the last few weeks, trying to answer that question. I think what I am going to say is that I am probably as confused, if not more confused than when I arrived. The more you know about the situation, often, the more complex the situation is. It is not something that can be written off as having an easy solution. What I'll be saying, though, is that the people are warm and wonderful, that they have and enormous sense of generosity, a lot to give and that they have lost an awful lot.

When I was thinking about coming to Yugoslavia, my Yugoslav friends in Australia listed all these wonderful things what you could do here going to Bled for a weekend, Dubrovnik for a weekend, Sveti Stefan for a weekend, Zagreb, which is a wonderful city... I had visions of being able to do all these wonderful trips out of Belgrade, using Belgrade as a sort of base for the Balkans. Unfortunately, I was not able to do any of them, which I think was a great loss, not for me, but for the people here who used to have such a great quality of life.

VREME: It seems that you underestimated the difficulties you encountered. Can one say you were unprepared?

SACHS: No, I don't think anyone was prepared for the situation, I think that this has been shown by the lack of international ability to resolve the conflict or to lead the participants to find some solution for the conflict. I believe I am an optimist. I was hoping all the time that things would get better, and that reason would prevail, that people would put down their arms, or at least that they would stop shooting at civilians. And I hoped that they would start taking more, but talking with meaning behind it, not talking with false words, but meaning what they are saying. Because, the civilians I have spoken to in Bosnia and in Yugoslavia, they are sick and tired of this war. I am sick of this war, although this is not a war I am directly involved in, nor do I have any emotional commitment in.

VREME: One of the things you probably didn't expect, are the political accusations made by all conflicting sides. Bosnian Serbs often accuse you of supplying the other side with ammunition and weapons. On several occasions General Ratko Mladic said that you were smuggling ammunition in sardine tins.

SACHS: Really? We have a standing invitation to the Bosnian Serbs that they can come to our main base for the air drops and that they can inspect anything which has been loaded onto those planes. Bosnian Serbs are also invited to come to our base in Belgrade and inspect our loading of the convoys. We are checked when we've loaded these convoys at Zvornik, convoys going to Srebrenica or Zepa or Sarajevo. We are checked by Bosnian Serbs at Zvornik, and Bosnian Serbs have never ever found anything on UNHCR convoys going to Srebrenica, Zepa, Tuzla from Belgrade. Similarly, in convoys going to Gorazde, Bosnian Serbs never found anything. I remember seeing Tanjug (Yugoslav state news agency) reports that there was gunpowder in jam jars, but we never distributed jam! We have never taken jam to the enclaves. There have been a couple of incidents, the Sarajevo incident for example in April last year when ammunition actually was found. We immediately reviewed our security procedures to make sure that something like that never happened again. Then we had the Banja Luka incident about three months ago. It was a family parcel which had been given to UNHCR by a Bosnian humanitarian organization, I think it was a Muslim nongovernmental organization. We made a mistake, we didn't check the contents of the parcels ourselves, we now have new procedures. There were a few copies of ``Oslobodjenje'' (Sarajevobased daily). There was some coffee, there was some brandy, there were stockings and a couple of bottles of perfume. But nothing which could be regarded as a possible security risk. Maybe Bosnian Serbs have some new fangled way of making some military technology out of a pair of lady's stockings.

VREME: The accusations coming from the Bosnian side are, perhaps more interesting. They accuse you of feeding them so that they can be a better target for the Serbs, and that you are actually helping prolong the war.

SACHS: I believe that we have saved lives. Without the help provided by the UNHCR there would be far more dead. As a humanitarian worker I could not, in full consciousness, sit back and let people die when I knew that I could get through to them, and at least try to help them. The only advantage of these accusations which are coming from all the three sides, the Croats, the Muslims and the Serbs, is, that we must be doing a good job. Because if all the three sides are accusing us of one thing or another, we must clearly be what we aim to beand that is neutral, impartial and unbiased. One thing that I will be leaving with, is a strong feeling that we have contributed to saving lives. But all the three sides have used and abused their civilian populations for their own military objectives, and that, I think, is one of the most despicable things about this conflict, when I see how little regard the authorities of these three groups have felt towards their civilian population.

VREME: There were also accusations from the West accusing UNHCR for supporting ethnic cleansing by pulling out the Muslims from endangered areas.

SACHS: This first came out when we were in Srebrenica, and I remember that my hair stood on end when I heard those accusations. Because, here we had a very clear choice: people dying under a hail of bullets, or from shells or from their wounds, illness, exposure and hunger, or UNHCR being accused of helping them and so ``aiding ethnic cleansing.'' Our conscience is clear. We saved people's lives, we took those people out of there to Tuzla.

VREME: How did you feel at the time of the threat of NATO strikes? Several Bosnian Serb officials said at the time that in the case of air strikes, UNHCR staff would be in danger of reprisals. Two Molotov cocktails were thrown at your offices in Belgrade.

SACHS: We were concerned that the population might not have realized that we are a humanitarian organization, and that we are not involved in something that is happening at the political level. I must admit I was personally angry when heard those threats. We invested so much money in helping Serb refugees. If they hold us hostage, we can't do our job, and our job is to help people. To me it showed once more, the complete disregard of the Bosnian Serb leadership for their civilian population who are sick and tired of this war.

VREME: What will you advise your successor?

SACHS: Patience. Always to be positive. Even when the times look extremely bleak. Perseverance, because I know there is a light at the end of this tunnel. I know the people here, they are tough, they will get back on their feet. It may take a little time before the sense prevails to realize that this war is useless. I'd advise him not to look at the big picture, because the big picture is very depressing, but instead to think about small victories. It's time that some good happened to this people, they deserve it. Dejan Anastasijevic