There is a stark simplicity to life in Amira Puzic's war-scarred apartment building in the northern Sarajevo neighborhood of Ciglane. At dusk the 18 families there prepare for another night of shelling by bedding down on couches and mattresses crammed onto landings of the central concrete stairwell. By day, when the barrage eases, they forage for food. But hunger has become a secondary consideration in the face of the almost constant bombardment, now well into its fourth month, by Serb forces firing from the surrounding hillsides. All day, every day, the talk in the building hallways is of Western military intervention or, failing that, distribution of weapons so that the 300,000 people of Sarajevo can repel the onslaught with their own hands. "The liberation of the town is more important than food," says Puzic, 37, an economist and mother of two. "We all fear that the West now thinks it has done enough."
The intent of the Serbs' incessant artillery and sniper fire is to break the will of Sarajevo, but it has only swelled the residents' anger. They welcome the international effort to fly in food and medicine but are worried that the relief operation is treating the symptom of shortage, not the cause. What Sarajevans want above all else is to see the aggressor routed. "A necessary evil" is Bosnia-Herzegovinian Defense Minister Jerko Doko's blunt term for the United Nations' hard-won airlift. "I wish the airport hadn't been opened in this way, because it has actually slowed down the liberation of Sarajevo."
Last week the sidewalk in front of Puzic's apartment building at Ise Jovanovic 21 was still stained brown with the dried blood of a neighbor mortally wounded by a sniper in broad daylight two days earlier. Shrapnel burst through the bedroom window of Puzic's 12-year-old son Damir and ripped the carpet. On the ground floor, Sandra Makcic's bedroom was gutted by a shell a month ago, minutes after she left it. Said Ramisa Trtak, 70, who moved into the building after her house in an outlying quarter was obliterated: "During the World War they aimed at strategic targets. In this idiotic war they aim at civilians."
At the once bustling Ciglane market nearby, frustrated shoppers picked through the meager offerings, then left with mostly empty plastic bags. There were potatoes the day before, but they sold out in less than five minutes. On Thursday huge cans of cucumbers were available for about half the average monthly wage. Bottles of beer and slivovitz -- hoarded or, as many mutter angrily, stolen -- are available at outrageous prices. Puzic bought toothpaste, soap and a bundle of broad coltsfoot leaves. "I've never eaten it before," she sighed with a dubious glance at the tough, shiny weeds normally used for treating asthma. "But what else is there?" In Sarajevo outright starvation is not a threat, though hospitals are reporting cases of scurvy.
In the Ciglane neighborhood, no one had yet seen any of the more than 900 tons of food and medical supplies airlifted to Sarajevo since July 3. The battered Zetra Stadium, site of the hockey competition in the 1984 Winter Olympics, has been designated one of four warehouses to store the foodstuffs brought from the airport under escort by U.N. armored personnel carriers. On Thursday half a dozen trucks from surrounding neighborhoods waited all day for a delivery due at 10 in the morning.