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It never came, fueling already rife rumors of corruption and inefficiency. But within its strictly peacekeeping mandate, the U.N. is doing a good job in near impossible conditions. Last week a convoy of four trucks loaded with baby food was pinned down at the airport for half an hour by sniper fire before it could roll out. Says Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie, commander of the 1,200 "blue helmets" in Sarajevo: "There's no cease-fire, and there was supposed to be one before the airport opened. We're doing our job in the eye of a hurricane."
The families in Puzic's building do not believe in cease-fires anymore. They see the war in their city not as an ethnic conflict but as an onslaught by terrorists, who will never hold to any agreement, against a civic tradition built on tolerance. Eight of the families there are either wholly or partly ethnic Serb, yet they are no less a part of the food sharing, the fearful waiting and the common suffering of the building's residents as they huddle under fire. "It never mattered before whether my neighbor is a Serb, and it doesn't matter now," says Makcic, a 25-year-old student whose father is half Serb.
The growing pressure in the West for some kind of military intervention heartens Sarajevo but also begs scores of unanswered questions. Finding and destroying Serb artillery emplacements and mortar sites in the rough hill country of Bosnia could prove tougher than taking out Scud launchers in the Iraqi desert. But it would be a simple action compared with the nearly impossible task of restoring common purpose for the peoples of Bosnia as the terror continues and the body count mounts.