SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Elderly nursing home residents are dying from bitter cold and malnutrition in Sarajevo, and there is an immediate danger that children trapped in the besieged Bosnian capital could begin to perish, the U.N. High Commission of Refugees said Monday.
Sporadic fighting was reported across Bosnia-Herzegovina as leaders of the Muslim Slav-led government, ultra-nationalist Croats and Serbian forces pursued talks in Geneva with peace mediators Cyrus Vance, Lord David Owen and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.Ghali was scheduled to visit Sarajevo for the day on Thursday for talks with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and U.N. officials stationed in the city.
UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler said at least 35 elderly patients of a nursing home situated close to the front lines on the western outskirts of the city have died over the past few months because of a lack of food and heat. "The mortality rate appears to be at least one person every two days," he said.
He added that there were at least 114 elderly residents still living in the nursing home and that their lives were at serious risk.
But, Kessler added, UNHCR was having trouble finding alternative accommodation in the center of town for them because existing refugee facilities are overflowing beyond capacity. "If this weather keeps up, children will start to die," Kessler warned as the mercury crept up from Sunday's minus 13 Celsius (8 Fahrenheit) to around minus 10 C (14 F).
An estimated 380,000 residents and refugees have been trapped and bombarded in Sarajevo for almost nine months by Serbian forces seeking to divide the city into ethnic districts as part of a campaign to rip a self-declared state out of the former Yugoslav republic of 1.9 million Muslim Slavs, 1.4 million Christian Orthodox Serbs and 750,000 Roman Catholic Croats.
Muslim Slav-dominated Sarajevo began a third week without electricity, which was cut by Serbian shellfire, and a second week without running water as residents struggled to cope with the aftermath of a fierce overnight blizzard that shrouded the capital in snow, muffling the sounds of machine-gun fire.
The snowfall coincided with a critical shortage of diesel and gasoline supplies that threatened to halt the distribution of the international food donations on which Sarajevo depends.
Record volumes of food are being brought into the Bosnian capital by land and the U.N.-organized international airlift, but an estimated 10 percent to 20 percent of the supplies have been diverted to the black market, Kessler said.