Ethnic Mix Could Be Explosive in Yugoslav Republic : Balkans: The combination of Serbs, Croats and Muslims will test the survivability of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

With its explosive mix of Muslims, Serbs and Croats, the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina has become the proving ground for Yugoslavia’s survival, the acid test of whether bitter rivals will choose to resolve their differences or risk death to defend them.

Nowhere is the search for ethnic harmony so elusive, religious intolerance so tenacious and the will to settle old scores so zealous as in this exotic and often violent crossroads between Europe and Asia.

It was an assassination in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo that provided the spark that ignited World War I, and a wellspring of national extremism in the west of the republic spawned the next war’s atrocities, in which more Yugoslavs were killed by each other than by the Fascist invaders.

Bosnia is the hard center of the unmelted Yugoslav pot, where the three main communities who share a language and stem from the same Slavic stalk have spent most of the past millennium refining the resentments that now consume them.

“History was not very nice to us,” understates Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic, recalling the past centuries of conquest and occupation that left competing traces of Hapsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey in their wake.

Four decades of communism tamped down ethnic passions but failed to extinguish them, allowing the hatred and differences to flare anew in the rich atmosphere of nationalism in post-Communist Bosnia.

Along the roaming frontier between East and West that cuts a wide swath through this mountainous republic, Catholic Croats stand armed and ready to repel possible incursions by Orthodox Serbs, and both are wary of the larger Muslim community whose recent drive for identity they see as a fundamentalist awakening.

“People are selling cows to buy Thompson (sub)machine guns,” says the republic’s acting information minister, Mustafa Mujagic, a Muslim filling in for his Serbian boss who has been hospitalized since he was beaten, allegedly by Croats.

“Tomorrow, these people will have no meat or milk, but they will have a gun,” Mujagic continues. “They will have to use that gun to rob others in order to eat. Stealing will worsen the fear and hatred, and then they will use the guns for killing.”

Many Bosnians see poverty and backwardness as the root of the republic’s ethnic problems.

“I need to worry about whether I still have a job next month, rather than who is Serbian and who is Croatian,” says Inez Tadic, an exasperated Sarajevo office worker of mixed Muslim and Croatian descent.

Her complaint about misplaced priorities can be heard throughout the variegated republic.

But Croatian and Serbian leaders have held economic recovery hostage to their seemingly irreconcilable political aims.

“The economy is not a matter of the first degree right now,” says Radovan Karadjzic, who heads the Serbian delegation to the republic’s fractious Parliament. “The main problem now is the rearranging of Yugoslavia.”

One of the few points that his Croatian counterpart, Stjepan Kljuic, agrees with is that politics must come first.

None of the three ethnic parties form an outright majority of the republic’s 4 million people. That has forced them into a hostile coalition in which no one appears willing to set aside group interests in favor of a peaceful compromise.

The only common ground is their ready concession that no one will be the winner in an ethnic war and their unshakable determination to fight one if national rights are infringed upon.

Serbs, who account for about 32% of Bosnia’s people, want the republic to remain tightly bound to Serbia within the Yugoslav federation, and they have vowed to quash any moves to relax ties to Belgrade.

Croats, about 18% of the republic, want an independent Bosnian state loosely aligned with whatever remains of the Yugoslav federation and with Slovenia and Croatia, which plan to assert full sovereignty by the end of this month.

Muslims, whose 44% of the population is evenly sprinkled around the republic, fear that both other nationalities actually seek to dismember Bosnia by annexing the territories they dominate to Serbia and Croatia.

There was a suspicious meeting two months ago between Serbia’s Communist president, Slobodan Milosevic, and Croatia’s nationalist head of state, Franjo Tudjman, during which the two allegedly discussed how they might divide Bosnia between them.

A senior Croatian official in Zagreb confirmed that the topic was touched on but said no agreement was reached.

Talk of tearing apart Bosnia has galvanized the Muslim community into joining an illegal arms race, injecting yet another combatant into the Yugoslav-wide conflict between Serbs and Croats.

Disregard of the shattered economy has forced Bosnian Muslims to turn to fellow followers of Islam for financial aid, fueling claims by Serbs and Croats that a fundamentalist state may be formed on Europe’s doorstep.

“The Muslim party and the Muslim people are very determined to make a Muslim republic here,” insists Karadjzic, the Serbian leader. “Europe will have a lot of trouble if it gets an Islamic republic on the Continent. There will be new tensions and problems of expansionism.”

Bosnian Foreign Minister Silajdzic, who is Muslim, dismisses such talk as “a good ploy aimed at an emotional reaction” and at diverting attention from the real issue, the economy.

Many now liken conditions in Bosnia and elsewhere in Yugoslavia to those of Germany in the 1930s, when the poor and jobless found solace in fanatic nationalism that served up scapegoats for their discontent.

“We are living in terrible times. And we are not headed for better times, I’m convinced of that,” says Mehmed Husic, deputy editor of Sarajevo’s main daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje. “The main problem is not nationalities now. It’s that we have hungry people, and they can’t listen.”

No relief is in sight because of Bosnia’s parliamentary deadlock and Yugoslavia’s disabled federal leadership. The country of 24 million has been without a president since mid-May, and efforts by Prime Minister Ante Markovic to resurrect the economy have been torpedoed by each republic’s insistence on putting its own interests first.

The six states have paid only about 40% of the $2 billion needed to finance the federation so far this year. The Belgrade government is behind by as much as three months in paying its workers.

The result is economic stagnation and recurring violence, which left at least 21 people dead in May alone and forced deployment of federal troops to enforce the peace.

But the soldiers have had no commander in chief since collapse of the presidency, which has left them positioned between the opposing forces without clear direction on how to proceed.

The army had been ordered to confiscate all illegal arms, but Serbian rebels have refused to disarm before Croatia’s tens of thousands of police reservists surrender their weapons.

Almost daily, there are shootouts and skirmishes in ethnically mixed areas of Croatia and Bosnia, or in the Serbian province of Kosovo where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs by 9 to 1.

Ethnic passions run high in Bosnia because it was the scene of the worst bloodletting of World War II. The Nazi puppet regime of Croatian Ustashas seized most of the republic’s territory in 1941 and slaughtered at least 700,000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

Serbian royalist Chetniks and Communist partisans exacted revenge later in the war by executing untold thousands of Ustashas. Caverns containing gruesome evidence of the massacres lay dormant for decades in the verdant hillsides of western Bosnia-Herzegovina. Last year, several of the bone-filled pits were reopened to underscore what Serbs argue is a need to remember the past.

The Serbian Academy of Sciences in Belgrade has also established a Genocide Institute to determine the exact number of victims of wartime fascism.

“A very ugly facet of Serbian nationalism is reviving the desire for revenge,” says Serbian historian Milorad Ekmecic.

But he also blames Croatian nationalists for prolonging their conflict with Serbs over who suffered more.

“We would like to forgive the Croatian people for this massacre,” says the Sarajevo University professor. “But first we want them to repent.”

Ironically, it is the collective shudder of terror over past excesses that provides the one ray of hope for what seems a menacing future.

“Fear is the force which is uniting us and keeping alive hopes for peace. People are afraid of new massacres, of civil war,” says Ekmecic. “The positive effect is that time is passing, and time can help. There is a foundation coming out of this balance of fear that could fuel a new sense of Yugoslav cohesiveness.”