No Dinner At Nato’s Trash Dump

About the time NATO troops were finishing the turkey and moving on to pie, Smail Mulavdic gave up at the garbage dump and went home with his family’s dinner fixings: bits of chocolate, a few crumbs of cake, some vegetables too old for soup.

“I think someone got here before us,” Mulavdic said, dejected, ankle deep in reeking sludge on a moonscape littered with large-size empty cans, military-ration wrappings and cartons marked, “Frozen Prawns.”

Four friends who were foraging with him agreed. The best any of them had done was a plastic sack of four brown celery stalks.

Mulavdic is neither a refugee nor a wounded soldier unfit to work. At 26, able-bodied if emotionally scarred, he is just another hungry Bosnian in a country thrown into desperation.

A Muslim, he is not worried about a bleak Christmas. It is all the other non-meals that scare him. His daughter, Samira, is nearly 4. She needs food, medicine and clothes.

“This is it. I have no other income,” Mulavdic said, casting a glance at his grim place of business, a NATO trash heap in a disused open-pit coal mine near Tuzla.

“We come here two or three times a week to see what we can find, maybe cake or chocolate bars or juice,” he explained.

One of his friends was Azmir Mazic, wizened at 15, in a dirty red sweatshirt and dirtier torn boots.

Asked what he wanted to do when peace settled in, Azmir just shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “I am thinking about what to eat today.”