Vares- Part II

Scroll down for the first part!

Early next morning, we did a new try to help the refugees. This time we brought two ambulance SISUS and a third weaponized escort/guard SISU. The chief for the group was Major Daniel Ekberg. We again negotiated ourselfs through the checkpoints, and went back to the place we had been last night. There we stopped in a valley between two mountains. We signaled with our powerful hornes and our interpreter Ruzdi Ekenheim shouted out through the megaphone that we were from UNPROFOR and was there to help! Nothing happened. If the refugees was there, they were to afraid of us to show themselfs. Twenty minutes went by, and we had to leave. If the HVO would find us there- then we would be in the crappers.

But then, when we had given up all hope; we heare the calls for help from a woman in the forest. By and by 25 frozen and shocked pieces of humanbeings came towards us. One of the womans had died during the night, but we had no chance of taking her with us. We had to leave her there.

A qute girl in her twenties throws herself crying around the neck of Ekenheim. She tells us that she had been forced to watch when her family got killed. Her boyfriend- who was walking with crutches after an earlier wound- was also killed before her eyes. She was told that "If she as much as felled a single tear, she would also be killed". After that she was raped and then thrown in to a house with a bunch of other people. The door was then barricaded and the house were set on fire.

Their sudden escape got probable because one of them found a sledghammer in the house, and could brake up a hole at the back of the house, running for the woods at the backside of the house.

In the middle of our reascue of the refgugees, a minibus full of Croatian HVO- soldiers comes running at us in high speed! I pointed my heavy machinegun towards them. I did not have to fire off the warning round that I had intended to do. By sheer fright when they saw the weapon they drow off the road. We let the trembling soldiers walk a way with two other HVO soldiers that had been captured in the other end of the convoy.

When we had asured us that we had got with us all the refugees, and loaded them in our allready crowded SISU:s. We drowe back down to the village Pominici, on the Bosnian side of the frontline. Our SISU was so full of people that I had to stand on one leg the whole trip. Not being able to creep down behind the machinegun made me feel like a glow in the dark target for the Croatian snipers.

To be continued...