ALTERNATE SITES    ANY DAY  OF THE YEAR IN HISTORY     ART “4” APR 10    wikipedia

TO THE TOP

2000 Ema Alic, 11, Goran Biscevic, 12, and Haris Balicevac, 12.       ^top^
3 Kids Go Out to Play...
                                 ... They Die Blasted by a Mine.
     Helpless to save her, NATO peacekeepers and townspeople watched from the edge of a minefield as a dying 11-year-old girl waved and pleaded for hours to be rescued. Ema, and her friends Goran and Haris died today after venturing into the minefield on the outskirts of Sarajevo, casualties of the Bosnian war that ended five years earlier.
      "For two hours, the girl was showing signs of life, waved with her little hand and called for help. Then she went quiet," would say the next day eyewitness Nenad Krestalica, 67, still visibly upset. His wife, Stana, said she was gardening when she heard the explosion.
      "We all started running. We heard a child's voice screaming for help," she said. "We called the police and they came, but nobody could approach the children."
      As the rescue team carried the bodies of the children from the minefield, Ema's father broke into tears, turned around and told his wife: "It's our child," other witnesses recalled. The woman fainted.
      The presence of the minefield was well-known, and signs warned of danger, residents said. Still, the field was not taped off, apparently because of lack of money.
      Dozens of people are killed and injured every month in explosions of some of the millions of land mines strewn across Bosnia. Minefields render large areas along the former front line unusable.
      Residents gathered around the minefield after the explosion Monday, followed by Italian members of the NATO-led peacekeeping force, but they could only watch the tragedy a few hundred meters away.
      Although the experts worked quickly once on the scene, more than 2 1/2 hours elapsed between the time a demining team was notified and the time it reached the victims. By then, all three children were dead.
      "It didn't take us more than half an hour to demine a small path to get to the children," said Zoran Gagula, one of the deminers. "We skipped standard procedures, risked our lives, and still, by the time we got to the children, they were dead." [< photo shows mine being defused near where the children died]
      Standard demining procedures are slow, with experts sometimes taking as much as an hour per square meter to minimize risk, prodding each inch of terrain for explosive devices.
      NATO experts arrived after a team from Norwegian People's Aid and therefore let that squad do the demining, said a NATO spokesman, Maj. Paul Hubbard. "They really did it as quickly as they could," said Hubbard.
      Andja Elek, 60, said she saw the children walking earlier and warned them not to play there because of the mines, "but they obviously didn't listen to me." "The girl was able to lift her head a few times and call for help," she said.
      Demining Bosnia could take decades. Money for the projects is in short supply, as the war fades in people's memories.
      The field was among the 77 areas around Sarajevo slated for demining but where work has been held up for lack of funds. Jusuf Jasarevic, the chief of the regional demining center in Sarajevo, said 500 demining experts are idle in Bosnia because there is no money to pay them. "Some 1818 minefields have been registered only around Sarajevo," he said. "But the public pays attention to the problem only when a tragedy like this occurs."
      The next day, friends and neighbors would pay their respects at the houses of the victims, and death notices for Ema and Goran would be posted by relatives at the school they attended. Goran's shows him smiling above a poignant text:

“Not believing it ourselves, we are informing all good people that,
in his 12th year and in a children's game,
Goran Bisevic died as a victim of a crazy war of adults.”