Clash May Have Eased Yugoslav Civil War Threat : Balkans: Tensions remain between Croats and Serbs. But officials’ cooperative statements suggest they hope to avoid a larger conflict.

Although Belgrade media reported as many as a dozen dead, blood in the streets and Serbian women and children gunned down among scores of civilians, casualties from Yugoslavia’s latest outbreak of violence appear limited to three Croatian policemen now recovering from flesh wounds.

Croatia’s special police units put down an armed rebellion by Serbian officers in the town of Pakrac without a single injury to the instigators, according to officials here in this Croatian capital.

The show of force by Croatia and hysterical outbursts by Serbians in Belgrade expose both sides as having indulged in a high-stakes game of political chicken.

But their short-lived confrontation may also have given pause for the chief protagonists in the Yugoslav crisis to rethink their current collision course toward civil war.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman claimed Monday that the ethnic power struggle at the Pakrac police station over the weekend was inspired by enemies of his democratically elected government “whose plan is to abolish it and restore Bolshevist socialism again.”

But in what may have been a face-saving revision of recent history, Tudjman and other senior Croatian officials claimed that Serbian-dominated federal troops were dispatched to Pakrac on Saturday to help rather than hinder their effort to restore order in the ethnically mixed town in northern Croatia.

“It was a coincidence that federal forces intervened at the same time,” Tudjman said, contending that the Yugoslav troops were engaged in a military exercise in the vicinity.

“The army is here to protect the government of this republic, as it protects elected authority in Serbia,” said Stipe Mesic, Croatia’s representative on the eight-man federal presidency. “The army did not intervene to clash with Croatian police.”

Federal officials and the army have said little since Sunday when the collective presidency rescinded the deployment order signed by Borisav Jovic, Serbia’s presidential representative and the current chairman of the body in which most Yugoslav authority is vested.

Jovic apparently acted alone in sending in the troops. The Tanjug news agency reported that Jovic issued the order to “prevent the escalation of inter-ethnic violence.”

But an emergency meeting of the full presidency a few hours later called on all outside forces to withdraw from Pakrac, a community of about 30,000 in which Serbs outnumber Croats.

Croatian police began pulling out before the Sunday midnight deadline, leaving only a token force to help keep the peace. The federal army showed no immediate signs of retreating but they are expected to pull out quietly after town life returns to normal.

Shops were open in Pakrac on Monday, although schools remained closed and federal soldiers in camouflage patrolled the town’s major intersections and approach roads.

Independent Yugoslav media on Monday confirmed Croatian reports that there had been no fatalities in the conflict, and that all three injuries involved Croatian policemen.

The apparently exaggerated Serbian media reports, which gave fictitious names of shooting victims and described scenes of bedlam that witnesses said never occurred, prompted anti-Croatian rallies but failed to trigger the wide-scale armed uprising many Yugoslavs had begun to fear. Among other things, the Belgrade media said that Serbian victims were chased down and cut in half by machine gun fire.

Historically rivalrous Serbs and Croats are the largest ethnic groups in multinational Yugoslavia. Both sides have been warning of an impending apocalypse, with Serbs accusing Croatia’s leadership of plotting a genocide, if the republic is allowed to break away from Yugoslavia, and Croats claiming that Serbian Marxists are trying to create a pretext to topple Croatia’s democratic government.

The fact that neither doomsday forecast came about during the weekend face-off may indicate a growing awareness of the risks in indulging their mutual hatred and mistrust.

Tensions between Serbs and Croats have been strained for centuries by religious and cultural differences. Croatia’s election last spring of a nationalist, democratic leadership and Serbia’s endorsement of hard-line communism have inflicted yet another rift in their relations.

Some minority Serbs who account for about 12% of Croatia’s 5 million population fear that an independent Croatia would revert to the fascist policies of the Nazi puppet regime that ruled the republic during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were systematically executed.

The Croats accuse Serbia’s Communist leadership of stirring irrational fears of Croatian independence in hopes of gaining territorial concessions after Yugoslavia splits.

Croatian officials argued that the brief clash in Pakrac may have served to reduce the chance of a cataclysm by showing that illegal actions can be halted without an excessive use of force.

“I would say that after the events in Pakrac, there is less of a chance there will be conflicts of a greater magnitude,” said Milan Brezak, a deputy minister of internal affairs in charge of Croatia’s 43,000 police and reservists. “Our forces in Pakrac sent the message that those people who try to violate the law in Croatia won’t be allowed to.”

The confrontation in Pakrac began when Serbian officers seized control of the police station on Feb. 22 and mobilized an exclusively Serbian reserve force. When the rebels disarmed 16 Croatian officers and set up barricades, Zagreb officials sent in about 150 police and a handful of armored vehicles to quell the uprising.

Federal troops and tanks moved in later Saturday after Jovic issued his order, but the Croatian government now claims Belgrade was intervening on its behalf.

The cooperative face put on after the incident many feared was the start of civil war suggests that both sides have decided to retreat from the brink of conflict and reconsider how else they might close the chasm between them.

The westernized republics of Slovenia and Croatia have taken steps to secede from the Yugoslav federation. Serbia, which has suffered a worsening economic crisis as the two northern republics cut back their contributions to the federal budget, wants to retain the federal system.

The conflict over Yugoslavia’s future has taken its toll on the economy, edging several republics and the federal government toward financial collapse.

“If the conditions remain the same, if anarchy, chaos and the laws of the Wild West continue, high inflation will be inevitable,” Prime Minister Ante Markovic warned in an interview published Monday.