Children open presents at a refugee camp in Karlovac, Croatia during the Bosnian War. The gifts were sent by families in the United States. Photo by Tom Burton

Presents of Peace: Refugee camp children in Croatia receive Christmas gifts from airlift

By Tom Burton of The Sentinel Staff

KARLOVAC, CROATIA — The children of this village spent the weekend building snowmen, singing carols and receiving presents, much as would be expected this close to Christmas.

When a badly thrown snowball hits a building, though, its icy patch sticks to a wall already gouged by artillery shells and bullets.

The carols are sung in a tiny Baptist church about a mile from what had been the front line of the Bosnian war. And the presents are given in a refugee camp. It is where the youngest children have lived most of their lives.

This is the region where 43,750 gift-filled shoe boxes collected in Central Florida will be distributed over the next several days by Operation Christmas Child. By Thursday, the boxes will have been given to children in Karlovac as well as the Bosnian cities of Bihac, Orasje and Tuzla.

The shoe boxes are part of the nearly 800,000 collected in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. They are being flown into the Balkans, Russia, Rwanda and Iraq. The airlift is the largest relief distribution of children's gifts in history.

Donations far exceeded the goal of 500,000 boxes set by Samaritan's Purse, the Christian relief agency that conducted the program. Franklin Graham, the president of Samaritan's Purse, attributes the large response to the personal touch of the gift boxes. Most of the boxes included not only toys, crayons and books, but also notes and photos from the families who sent them.

''People get frustrated because (they think) their $20 won't make a difference,'' Graham said. But this, he said, ''is a project they can do.’'

At a refugee camp in Karlovac on Saturday afternoon, Graham worked with other volunteers distributing about 150 boxes to the children living there. The younger children shyly accepted the boxes and seemed amused by the attention from the 15 to 20 members of the foreign press flown in by Samaritan's Purse to cover the first day of distribution.

Their smiles, however, were genuine when they looked in the packages. Six-year-old Kristijon Zortron got her friends giggling as she tried to blow a party horn hard enough to get the paper tube to roll out.

Kristijon's family is part of at least 2.5 million refugees displaced by the Bosnian war. Her hometown of Plitvioka Igigra has been destroyed. She has lived in the camp for four years. Her father returned from the war just last month to rejoin his family.

The small building her family shares with another family is a short distance from Turanj, where the Serbian front line had been until July of this year. A drive through the abandoned village showed that every building had been blasted, every window broken. Many roofs were gone. Despite a moderate snow cover, the scene was similar to a hurricane aftermath with one major difference. A storm always spares a few buildings. Nothing survived this man-made assault.

Nightfall comes in mid-afternoon during the Croatian winter, and the relief workers and media at the refugee camp moved on at dusk. Was the popping heard in the darkness from firecrackers the children had been lighting or from gunfire in the countryside?

That evening, at the Baptist church in Karlovac, pastor Ladislav Ruzicka introduced a children's choir that sang ''Zvoncici,'' the Croation version of ''Jingle Bells.'' Country music star Ricky Skaggs, a volunteer on the trip, sang ''Silent Night'' with his wife, Sharon.

After the program ended, the children carried their gift-filled shoeboxes and walked home with their mothers. The night was cold, but it wasn't completely dark because the city has electricity.

This year, a few of the town's businesses had hung Christmas lights on their shop windows. Small colored lights that not long ago would have been targets for sniper fire are now a cautious sign for a season of peace.

This story originally appeared in December, 1995, in the The Orlando Sentinel