By David Rolland

Month after month, the news from Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia is of yet more carnage.

West Marin residents read it with their morning coffee -- sometimes in silent anguish, almost always feeling helpless. The Balkans are far away; the grievances are complicated; the ethnic animosities long predate this violence.

One Inverness Park resident, however, spent six months in Bosnia-Hercegovina during 1993-94 trying to help reduce the suffering.

"In Bosnia, there's no way a person can know how bad it is if they haven't been there," said Mark Bartolini, who works for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organization based in New York. "It's worse than it looks on television."

While working in Croatia, Bartolini saw results of political terror that went beyond imagination.

The man, a Bosnian Muslim about 30, was too emotionally deadened to speak, but his sister hysterically told Bartolini of her brother's grisly ordeal.

Bosnian Serbs had imprisoned her brother and another sister, who was pregnant, in a concentration camp in Bosnia-Hercegovina. He had been tortured so severely he had tried to commit suicide more than once.

At the end of his imprisonment, the man was forced to have sex with his sister, then to slit open her belly and abort her baby, and finally to slit her throat.

Unfortunately, the wretched man's "story is not unique in terms of the bizarreness and the brutality," Bartolini told The Light during an interview at his Inverness Park home. He cited similar incidents, including one in which Serb torturers forced a Muslim father and son to orally castrate each other.

"The Serbs got into some really bizarre sexual torture," Bartolini observed grimly.

In the case of the Muslim forced to kill his sister, Bartolini said he never learned why the man didn't simply refuse to cooperate and let himself be killed.

"He was just kind of blank -- just emotionless," Bartolini said. "You could see by the way he moved that his bones were broken. He opened his mouth, and his teeth were all knocked out."

How did Bartolini react to the account of torture?

"Frankly, I was repulsed," he said. "That was a tough one. I don't know if nausea is the right word, but let's just say I didn't sleep well after that."

"When you're traveling in Bosnia," Bartolini said, "you can travel in the same place 10 times and everything is fine," but at a moment's notice, that same place becomes a killing field.

In his first few days in Bosnia, he saw hundreds of nearly catatonic refugees wandering country roads away from their devastated towns.

In some cases, he said, they were headed for communities in worse shape than those they had left. What struck him most about the refugees, Bartolini added, were "the bewildered looks on their faces."

Perhaps even worse than the physical destruction to cities and towns has been the psychic trauma of risking one's life just to get food. "To survive," he said, civilians "have to go out and subject themselves to sniper fire."

Bartolini realized he too would have to endure emotional trauma when he became an employee of the International Rescue Committee.

The IRC, founded in 1932 by physicist Albert Einstein, provides food and medical supplies to civilian victims of war and resettles refugees. The group currently operates in 32 different countries.

The Inverness Park resident praised in particular the IRC's "seed project," which has given vegetable seeds to thousands of hungry Bosnians.

While he was in Sarajevo, Bartolini said, "people were growing vegetables on their balconies or wherever they could [while] dodging snipers. It was a bizarre sight."

For Bartolini, relief work has been a longtime goal. He was surprised to learn that many other people have the same aspirations. The Inverness Park resident wasn't hired until August 1993, eight months after he applied.

"'Who is crazy enough to go over there?'" he recalled wondering, "but there are a lot of people who want to do this kind of work, thank God."

Bartolini worked in the IRC's information office, coordinating efforts between relief organizations, weeding out useless donations, and "indoctrinating" new relief workers by giving them the lay of the land.

Bartolini noted the Bosnian Serbs have repeatedly thwarted the efforts of humanitarian organizations trying to supply civilians with food and medicine. In fact, one of Bartolini's duties was to help transfer supplies from relief organizations that could not get through Serb checkpoints to organizations that could.

During Bartolini's stint in Bosnia, relief organizations together lost on average one worker per week. "Knock on wood, I don't think we lost anyone from our organization," he said.

With medical aid in short supply, the IRC has set up primitive hospitals in cities like Zagreb to perform "meatball surgery."

Ordinary hospitals are not safe places, he noted, since "one of the horrors of this war is that Serbs are targeting hospitals. It is a way to terrorize the population." He cited the shelling of Kosevo Hospital in Bosnia, where 258 patients, nurses, and doctors have been killed.

Bartolini recounted stories of Serb snipers aiming for the heads of people wearing bulletproof vests "just to show [each other] what a good shot they were."

He noted that the much-publicized "ethnic cleansing" is a Serb expression for ridding a village of any ethnic group other than Serbs and any religion other than Serbian Orthodox Christianity.

As ethnic Serbs seized the land of Muslims in Bosnia and Catholics in Croatia, "they would kill all remnants of [the victims'] culture [and] their history," Bartolini said.

Muslim mosques and Catholic churches have been blown apart. Houses have been torched after being looted. The belongings go onto the black market."There are a lot of people who are getting awfully wealthy off ethnic cleansing," he said.

Likewise, he said, the Croats "acted absolutely reprehensibly during their one-year war with the Bosnian government."

Although the Bosnian and Croatian governments have both had to fight civil wars with their own Serb minorities, the opportunistic Croats briefly tried to take advantage of Bosnia's troubles to annex some of its territory.

The two countries are now somewhat reconciled, but it was hardly the first time in recent history that a Croatian government behaved ruthlessly.

From 1941 to 1945, the ultra-nationalistic Ustasa movement, which patterned itself after German and Italian totalitarianism, took control of the country.

These days, Bartolini noted, some military irregulars can be seen wearing Ustasa uniforms. While he doesn't think these ultra-nationalists dominate national affairs, he acknowledged, "There are certainly fascist elements in the government of Croatia."

During the Croatians' year-long effort to seize land from Bosnia, "they came in and committed horrible atrocities," Bartolini said and cited a massacre of more than 100 Muslims from the town of Amici in central Bosnia.

Bartolini noted he has personally studied documentation of a Croat massacre of Bosnians in the town of Drejetl, where 70 died and scores were tortured.

In most concentration camps run by the Croat army -- and the rebel Serbs -- he said, the condition of inmates was "indistinguishable" from that of Nazi Holocaust prisoners.

"It's really the [UN] Security Council that has been fumbling in Bosnia," he said. By letting the Bosnian-Serbs know they will not be militarily opposed, the United Nations has "provided a blueprint for future war criminals," charged Bartolini.

The UN, he said, has implicitly told the Serbs how to "thwart the international community. There are still 2.5 million people under siege [in Bosnia]. It's criminal to write off the Balkans."

Bartolini is not only frustrated by the UN's capitulation to virtually every demand of the Bosnian Serbs, he also fears the strategy is "analogous to what went on in Munich in 1938 with the appeasement of Hitler."

(In September, 1938, Britain's then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, along with Italian and French representatives, signed the Munich Pact, which ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Chamberlain hoped this would appease Hitler's demands for more territory. Hitler instead was emboldened and invaded Poland six months later.)

Those interested in donating money for relief work in the Balkans can write the International Rescue Committee at 122 East 42nd St., New York, New York, 10017 or call the IRC's San Francisco resettlement office at 863-3777.