Legless Ghost Embodies Horrors Faced By Shellshocked Town Tuzla Residents Still Traumatized After Mortar Attack Killed Scores Of Young People Last Spring

Peace has come. The mortar shells have stopped falling, but still, no one drives by Kapija Square after midnight.

The square in Tuzla’s old town has been deserted since word spread that the ghost of one of the 71 young people killed in a mortar attack last spring has been seen at the blast site, searching in vain for her severed legs.

The ghost was spotted last month by a military police officer, Mustafa Piric, who afterward told friends he had stopped a girl with long blond hair after curfew to ask for her identification papers.

When she turned around, he saw that she had no face, and then he heard her say, “Give me back my legs.”

Police have no record of this sighting, and Piric has been transferred. But the tale has found many believers in a city still recovering from the fall of a mortar shell that instantly wiped out so many of Tuzla’s young people.

“It’s terrifying at night, cold and dark with the fog rising,” said Alma Ahmedbegovic, a 20-year-old radio reporter who had helped pull dying friends from the rubble in the square.

“No one goes near there at night. You go in a big circle around it to avoid the area. A lot of people here believe in ghosts and spirits, and they believe this girl’s spirit can’t rest because she was buried without her legs.”

While some residents think the talk of ghosts is rubbish, others, such as Ahmed-begovic, regard the story as proof that Tuzla has not recovered its mental equilibrium in the eight months since the attack.

And there are those who are certain the ghastly story is true.

Maida Hamzic, a nurse with long blond hair who celebrated her 19th birthday last week, said the ghost had been seen by three police officers on patrol. The fact that three people saw the same thing means the story is true, she said.

“I believe that ghost was real, and I believe the stories about people hearing strange sounds and moans coming from there late at night are real,” said Hamzic, who suffered minor injuries but great mental anguish in the mortar attack. Her boyfriend and several other friends were killed.

The people of Tuzla already had endured more than three years of war when the mortar hit. The city was under siege. Able-bodied men and teens were mobilized and sent to the front lines to fight. Food supplies dwindled.

Air-raid sirens had sounded earlier in the evening of May 25 to warn of a possible attack, but the sirens had become routine - and often were ignored.

The shell, fired by Bosnian Serbs controlling a nearby mountaintop, landed amid the crowded Kapija Square cafe district. Most of the victims were in their late teens or early 20s. The youngest was 3-year-old Sandro Kalesic, who died when shrapnel pierced his heart.

Many lost their legs or arms or were decapitated by shrapnel. Some corpses were impossible to identify. The mass funeral was held secretly in the middle of the night for fear of another attack.

The emotional impact was magnified by the fact that virtually everyone in the city knew someone who had died. Also, parents and those who survived tended to blame themselves for the deaths of their children and friends.

“A huge number of people were directly connected to the event, either as eyewitnesses or helping to rescue victims or bringing them to the hospital,” said Dr. Kasim Birgic, a psychiatrist at the city clinic. “Everybody who saw it has psychiatric problems, even if they were not directly wounded.”

Parents in their homes also were traumatized because they heard about the explosion and knew dozens of people had died, but they could not discover the fate of their own children until morning came, Birgic said.

Some people have told the psychiatrist of seeing ghosts at the bomb site. Others say they have awakened from nightmares to see their dead friends standing in front of them, as if they were real. Loss of appetite and sleep disturbances are common.

Painful flashbacks are the most frequently reported symptom.

“Every day, people come in who are having flashbacks and are afraid,” Birgic said.

Since the explosion, he has seen a sharp rise in psychosomatic illnesses - headaches, chest pains and stomachaches that have no physical basis - and an increase in the use of alcohol, marijuana and prescription drugs.

Many townspeople are suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. And they cannot believe the war is finally over despite the signed peace agreement and the cease-fire, he said.

“Healthy young people can recover from this,” he said. “But a young person with four years of war is not so strong anymore.”

Some people have turned to Birgic at the psychiatric clinic. Others have sought the help of traditional faith healers such as Sadifa Dzafic, who performs time-honored rituals to rid the body of evil spirits and to cure common complaints such as skin rashes.

Dzafic, an elderly woman who sees patients in her small living room, said attack survivors have come to see her because they could not sleep and had no appetite.

“One girl became unconscious after the explosion, and when she woke up, she was covered with blood,” Dzafic said. “She found she was not wounded, and she was taken home. The blood was from other people. But she was so upset she was afraid to sleep.”

The experience of Hamzic, the young hospital nurse who says she believes the ghost story, is similar. But it was made more intense because she lost her boyfriend and because - for one instant - a member of his family seemed to blame her for his death.

She remembers laughing and joking with her friends at the Kapija Cafe when there was a blinding flash of light and she was knocked to the ground by the detonation of the shell roughly 15 yards away.

“I knew it was a mortar shell, and I was lying on the ground too scared to open my eyes, and I could feel some bodies, or body parts, on top of me,” she said. “When I finally managed to open my eyes, I saw blood in front of my eyes. I thought the blood was mine, and I was too scared to touch my head to find out.”

She does not remember feeling pain, even though her arm was cut by shrapnel. But she recalls tremendous heat from the explosion.

“It was like a century to me,” she said. “I didn’t know if I had any legs at all, and I was too scared to find out. I understood what was happening. I realized it was quite possible another shell would fall.”

When Hamzic got up, she saw bodies and body parts everywhere. She remembers seeing a scene from her fifth birthday party and other events from her life, and she thought she might be dying.

“It was so hard to see all those people dying in front of my eyes and not being able to help them,” she said.

Hamzic was taken to a hospital, where her wound was treated. She then tried to find her boyfriend. She refused to enter the morgue, preferring to think he was alive. She told herself he might be in surgery.

After several frustrating hours, she ran into her boyfriend’s panic-stricken brother.

“He put his hands on my shoulders and shook my shoulders and said, ‘Where is he? He was with you,”’ she said. “That sentence hurt me the most, as if I was the guilty one.”

Early the next morning, Hamzic was told that her boyfriend was dead.

“That was a man I loved very much,” she said. “If he had survived, I might not be so traumatized. For the first two months, I was taking sedatives and having medical treatment, and for about six weeks, I dreamed about it. Every dream brought blood and dead bodies.”

Then she reached a turning point and started to emerge. When depression hits now, Hamzic tries to fight back.

“All of us who survived feel guiltiness. We ask, ‘Why them? Why not me?”’ she said. “You feel guilty because they died. But now, I tell myself that this happened in the past, and I want to live.”