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Dr. Ilijaz Pilav

Srebrenica hospital is empty. Serb forces are attacking the town and the majority of the population are already fleeing. As I watch the stream of people fleeing from the hospital window, I have no doubt that they must save themselves and I must stay. I hope I survive the day.

Srebrenica resistance fighters have liberated Srebrenica. Our impossible work at the hospital continues as normal.

My colleagues and I have formed the wartime hospital of Srebrenica. For now I am tending to our soldiers on the front. I will join the hospital shortly.

🧵 I have joined my colleagues at Srebrenica’s war hospital. The conditions we are operating in are inhumane.

This is a hospital only in the sense that the building was formerly a hospital. We have no kind of sanitary material, no kind of medication, no medical equipment.

The hospital is full of the wounded. We make bandage material out of bed sheets. We are sterilising bandages on a wood stove, regardless of the fact that it’s the middle of July, because there is no electricity.

We are making disinfectant from industrial iodine and hydrogen. We are diluting it to a tolerable ratio in order to clean wounds.

You can smell the scent of pus a kilometre away from the hospital. You can hear the screams of the wounded from further out still. We don’t have anaesthetics, so we have nothing to alleviate their pain.

Try to imagine that you have a severely wounded person on a table who needs their arm or leg amputated. You have nothing to give them as an anaesthetic, so you ask them to be patient and endure an excruciating pain which you are certain you yourself could not withstand.

My colleagues are mostly med students. Some from first grade, some from second grade, and some with three completed years. I repeat: the conditions under which we are forced to operate are simply inhumane.

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