Rumor & Reality

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For those who live there, Bosnia is a child's worst nightmare, a land where horror is the custom. Fathers disappear. Friends die. Neighbors flee. Food is short, bombs fall and suffering is a way of life. The familiar names of cities and towns have turned into symbols of destruction, siege, massacre, "ethnic cleansing."

The stories of savagery have come to define life in what was Yugoslavia. Whether they are fact or fiction is almost irrelevant: what people think is happening determines behavior. Serbs say that they fear the imminent imposition of a scourging fundamentalist Islamic regime in the heart of Europe, and that they must defend themselves however they may. Muslims tell tales of castration and execution at the hands of Serbs, justifying their imprisonment or expulsion from the small enclaves they still control. The very fear of brutality has set off a huge exodus of Bosnia-Herzegovina's population in search of safety. "Emotions, not rationality, have the upper hand," says Francois Heisbourg, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Not all the stories are true. But even if truth is the first casualty in every war, more than enough is real about the horrors in Bosnia. Some of the atrocity stories are exaggerated and some of the numbers of victims inflated, but the evidence of inhumanity and brutality on a staggering scale is there for everyone to see.

As they moved through the hinterlands of the former Yugoslavia last week, TIME correspondents found believable evidence everywhere. In the northern village of Trnopolje they visited the "Fraternity" elementary school that Serb militia forces have turned into a detention camp for 4,000 people, mostly Muslim men. Half the captives live outdoors in makeshift lean-tos; they all ^ get the same dirty water and use the same three toilets. One inmate, Hajudin Zubovic, a 28-year-old miner, told how a dozen or more prisoners at a ceramics factory in the area had been forced to stand in the sun all afternoon on July 24 and Serbian guards beat 10 of them to death, then fired rifles into a room filled with more than 150 men. Says Zubovic: "Thirteen hundred of us heard their screams."

Now safe in Croatia, Marijana, 17, stuttered out the terrible events of last April. After raping her and her mother, Serb irregulars carried Marijana off to a camp in the forest, where she and a group of other women were raped repeatedly over several weeks. They finally freed her when she became pregnant; she vows, "I will not give birth." But her doctor says she is in her 20th week and an abortion is out of the question. No one at the hospital has been brave enough to tell her that.

Outside the police station in the northwest town of Prijedor, dozens of Muslims stood in line to apply for permission to leave. As in most Serb-held territory, the departing can get exit papers only in exchange for signing a document relinquishing all claim to their property and possessions. Serb police chief Simo Drljaca gloated that none of the 9,000 Muslims he says applied to leave wanted to remain in the mayhem that is Bosnia.