Bosnia’s Children Who Survive Are Also Victims : Balkans: Killers know that the death of a child demoralizes the family. Psychiatrists on a special mission are attempting to ease the mental trauma.

The children of Bosnia are afraid of the light, not the dark.

The dark offers cover from snipers. In this war, snipers systematically kill children.

This war not only kills with bullets but has introduced AIDS into the country. In this war, teen-age girls turn to prostitution for cigarettes and food.

About 6,000 of Sarajevo’s 60,000 children have been killed. At least 14,000 have been wounded. Most Bosnians have lost at least one member or relative in a war that has gone on around them for almost three years.

The war has left psychological scars as well.

Three mental health professionals from the University of Missouri are working with the country’s teachers, training them to act as mental health-care lay persons.

“The first child I talked with saw his father killed in front of him,” said Dr. Arshad Husain. “He later lost his mother, and all his siblings. This child is just 10 years old.”

Husain, a native of India, is chief of child psychiatry at Missouri University’s Hospitals and Clinics and a professor of psychiatry and neurology. He has an international reputation and received a call from Bosnia asking for help. His trip there in September was his fourth.

He says the children are suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, similar to that experienced by Vietnam veterans. They are hungry, cold and grief-stricken. They have flashbacks, nightmares, suffer from depression.

Their local teachers, as classwork, had assigned the youngsters to draw pictures of their experiences--much as they might assign scenes from a class trip, the sort of rudimentary crayon drawings that decorate refrigerators across America.

The scenes these children drew are shocking. They drew tanks and guns and bodies and bullets, the horrors the war has brought to the very young.

Their teachers, untrained, saw no value in such assignments, Husain said. Instead they were protective. Their theory was to keep the children busy with their studies and not allow them to talk about the atrocities.

The teachers were unaware of the therapeutic value of such assignments or even, Husain said, “the therapeutic value of crying. They thought one way to be strong was not to cry in front of the children. Many of the teachers were having lack of concentration and hyperactivity themselves.

“Reluctantly, they allowed us to interview the first batch of children.

“I was crying. They were crying. The teachers were crying. The children were telling us how their mothers were killed, how their fathers were killed in front of them. People from the teachers group then started talking about their fears.”

And that was the Americans’ first breakthrough.

Along with Husain, the other American professors are Dr. Bill Holcomb and Dr. Teru Morton, both clinical associate professors of psychiatry and neurology at the MU School of Medicine.

Holcomb worked with frustrated teen-agers, youngsters who could no longer go into the mountains to ski. The first time he went, the American team got there just as the cease-fire occurred.

“There was hardly anybody out,” Holcomb said. “They had literally been in basements for 22 months. There were no stores, no restaurants open, but what was really impressive was to see the people as they began working. It was just great to see the human spirit there, cleaning up glass. When the shelling stopped, it was like each day a flower opened.”

Holcomb said that as he walked the devastated streets of Sarajevo--a city that had been called the “Paris of the Balkans”--people clapped for him just because he was an American.

“The U.S. planes had shot down some Serbian planes and they wanted us there, they wanted us to intervene,” Holcomb said. “There was a great feeling of helplessness. They felt like they had been abandoned by everyone.”

The teen-agers, he said, all remembered the 1984 Winter Olympics.

But now those mountains where they had skied were the stronghold of the snipers. They desperately wanted to get into those mountains and they could not.

“Bosnian teen-agers claim they are not afraid of death,” Holcomb said. “They’re worried about being maimed and becoming invalids. Their lack of fear about death probably has to do with the fact that they’ve seen so much of it. . . . It’s been demystified for them.”

The psychiatrists have trained about 300 of the nation’s 5,000 teachers so far and are training some of them to train more teachers. According to Holcomb, most of the country’s native mental health professionals fled when the war began.

Holcomb has photographs of two famous libraries in Sarajevo that no longer exist. One housed rare Oriental documents; the other, beautiful with stained-glass windows, was the largest library in the Balkans. Today the students can’t even get paper for schoolwork.

Husain noted that the team members wore flak jackets and helmets, and were on the street while mortar shells exploded.

“Denial was our best friend,” he said. “We did not run for cover.”

He also sympathizes when the youngsters complain of the cold. He and his team would be bundled in six or seven layers of clothing, but still they would head for the warmest corner of any room.

In one survey, 900 out of 1,000 children said they didn’t want to live. They thought they would die from the cold.

The third member of the team, Teru Morton, says she wished she had had a camera with her when she met with a group of women who had been widowed.

“They were as blank-eyed and ghostly group as you could see,” she said. She also heard of children who, instead of attending school, had become caretakers for surviving parents who had curled up in fetal positions.

The Americans report that the killing of the children has completely undermined family units, the fiber of the country.

If a husband and a wife and their child were walking together down the street, said Morton, the snipers would deliberately shoot the child, a devastating situation in a nation that remains very family-oriented.

The children remain the focus of the Americans’ efforts. “The ones we don’t see, the ones we hear about, are probably the ones who need the most help,” Morton said.

Husain told of one little boy who would run for the basement when his father snored at night. The snoring sounded to him like shelling.

A number of the schoolchildren, the team reported, also have vision problems, probably from a poor diet. Some of the people had not had any beef for 22 months when the Americans arrived. Many survived on a bread and rice mixture, a casserole in which all available food was just thrown in.

Most overwhelming to the psychiatrists was the feeling of helplessness, that things were not going to get better.

Husain says that depression, sleep disorders, lack of concentration, might get worse when and if peace comes. Now, he says, at least there is a tremendous amount of energy being spent in simply surviving, in staying alive. He says that when things are calmer the trauma may come back tenfold.

“It took us a long time to win their trust, to show that we were going to keep coming back,” he said. “This is not a one-shot program. It’s an ongoing effort.”

Husain has traveled to small villages outside Sarajevo where he says things are just as bad. He believes a similar program of teachers empowered to become mental health lay persons could benefit parts of rural Missouri.

“It’s extremely cost effective and teachers know the children well. They know when they’re behaving and when they’re misbehaving and it’s a natural situation for them to help. They see the children more than their own parents and often know them better.”

In Sarajevo, the children are once again drawing pictures, however haunting, expressing their anxieties in art.

And now, with group therapy added, the Americans seem confident mental health will improve.

The professors are donating their time. Their first two trips to Bosnia were sponsored by the Taibah International Aid Assn., a Washington-based organization funded by Muslims. UNICEF and other agencies are picking up the rest of the bills.