16 Die as Ethnic Strife Escalates in Yugoslavia

Gun battles between Croatian police and militant Serbs killed at least 16 people in what the Croatian president warned Friday might have been the opening salvo of a Yugoslav civil war.

Thirteen Croatian police officers and three civilians, believed to be Serbian rebels, died in the worst day of ethnic violence suffered by the crisis-racked federation since World War II.

Croatian authorities in the republic capital of Zagreb claimed that the victims had been tortured and the corpses mutilated--a charge that might incite retaliatory violence against Serbs in the intractable nationalist rivalry between Yugoslavia’s two largest ethnic groups.

“They were all mutilated, decapitated,” Yugoslav Vice President Stipe Mesic said of the Croatian victims during an interview on Radio Zagreb. “They were treated in the most bestial manner.”

Most of the victims were killed during a daylong gunfight Thursday in the village of Borovo Selo in Slavonia, an ethnically mixed area near Croatia’s northeastern border with Serbia.

Another 21 police officers and six civilians were hospitalized with wounds from the fighting, which broke out when Croatian authorities were ambushed while looking for two fellow police officers who had disappeared the previous day while on patrol.

Federal army tanks mobilized for the fourth time in recent weeks to quell the violence and seal off Borovo Selo and nearby villages along the Danube River.

No new clashes were reported Friday, but the atmosphere throughout Croatia remained tense.

One of the shooting deaths occurred in a separate ethnic skirmish in the village of Polace in southwestern Croatia. Rebel Serbs shot a Croatian officer to death, which touched off retaliatory pillaging of Serbian-owned shops.

Croatian President Franjo Tudjman appealed for calm in special radio and television broadcasts from Zagreb. He placed the blame for the deadly clashes on “dogmatic Communist elements” in Serbia and said the attacks on Croatian police officers constituted “the beginning of open warfare.”

Mesic, a moderate who is Croatia’s representative on the eight-member federal presidency, told journalists in Belgrade that he suspected the attack on police in Borovo Selo had been staged by ethnic extremists who came in from Serbia, rather than by local Serbs.

Serbian militants have been fighting Croatia’s move toward independence from Yugoslavia, and authorities fear provocations and bloodletting are likely to continue as May 15 approaches. On that day, the rotating chairmanship of the federal presidency moves from Serbia to Croatia, which will sharply curtail the influence of Serbian Communists over the armed forces and other organs of power.

The current federal president, Serbian Communist hard-liner Borisav Jovic, has repeatedly tried to use the army to intervene in conflicts between Croatian republic authorities and the 600,000-strong Serbian minority in Croatia. But the multinational army has resisted being drawn into a divisive and protracted battle along ethnic lines, choosing instead to quickly impose relative order, then withdraw.

Federal troops were sent into the town of Pakrac after an exchange of gunfire between police and angry Serbs on March 2. Three Croatian police officers were injured in that confrontation.

The army was deployed a week later to quell anti-Communist rioting in Belgrade, which set off a damaging political crisis for Serbia’s Communist president, Slobodan Milosevic.

The rioting broke out after Milosevic ordered Serbian police to charge peaceful protesters calling for an end to Communist manipulation of the mass media. A police officer and a 17-year-old demonstrator were killed in the melee, and Milosevic was accused of having set Serb against Serb to protect his personal power.

Two people died in a Serb-Croat clash in the Plitvica nature preserve in late March, which prompted a massive deployment of special peacekeeping troops and reservists throughout the troubled Krajina region.

Krajina is the name given to a chain of Serbian enclaves scattered through Croatia along what was, until early this century, the border between Europe’s two great empires, Ottoman Turkey and Austria-Hungary.

Serbs in Krajina have declared themselves independent of Zagreb’s authority.

Dozens of bombs have exploded in Krajina over the past few weeks, primarily in Serbian-controlled towns like Knin, in Croatia’s south. Several unexplained blasts rocked Krajina on Friday, but no casualties were reported.

Croatian authorities contend that the violence is orchestrated by Serbia’s Communist leadership to distract attention from the republic’s economic disaster and political turmoil that has resulted from the brutal suppression of demonstrators two months ago.

Slovenia, the most affluent of Yugoslavia’s six republics, issued a statement in support of neighboring Croatia after the latest violence.

Lawmakers in the tiny alpine republic bordering Austria plan a special session Wednesday to accelerate plans for secession, including bills disengaging Slovenia from the federal monetary system.

Special correspondent Montgomery reported from Belgrade and staff writer Williams from Budapest, Hungary.