As NATO prepared to launch air strikes against Serbian forces choking Sarajevo, an American Jewish relief agency announced this week that it was making emergency funds available to provide medical aid to children in the besieged Bosnian capital.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee said Wednesday that it would allocate $25,000 in emergency funds to provide medical trauma treatment to children unable to receive it because of the lack of electricity and medical supplies in Sarajevo.
The move came in the wake of the widespread publicity about 5-year-old Irma Hadzimuratovic, who was flown from Sarajevo to London on Monday after being seriously wounded in a shelling attack that killed her mother.
The funds will be made available to all children in the war-torn city, regardless of their religious or ethnic background.
“These children lost their innocence and their childhood in this ongoing war,” said Ambassador Milton Wolf, president of the JDC. “The least we can do is to help save their lives by facilitating medical help.”
The move came after the hospital in Sarajevo put a call through to JDC’s New York headquarters Monday and described the urgent need to assist the growing number of wounded children.
In a separate development, the American Task Force for Bosnia — a coalition including Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Arab American groups — held a news conference in Washington last week to mark the one-year anniversary since then-candidate Bill Clinton spoke out against Serbian killings of Bosnian Muslims and others.
Jewish groups, seeing parallels between Serbian policies of “ethnic cleansing” and the Nazi Holocaust, have been involved for months in efforts to push the Clinton administration to take stronger action in the former Yugoslav republic.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
