Serbs and Croats Face Off Along Frontier of Hatred : Yugoslavia: With an uneasy peace holding in Slovenia, concern focuses on ancient hotbed of rivalry.

For Capt. Dragan, conditions couldn’t be better. The lean, almost boyish-looking officer with a disarming smile and salt-and-pepper hair provides no first name and few details of his past. But he is building a legend as an astute military strategist in a nation that teeters on the brink of civil war.

Dragan’s force of 12,000 men is charged with defending the Krajina, a crescent-shaped chain of mountainous, Serbian-dominated villages and towns strung across southern Croatia, the girth of central Yugoslavia.

Events of the past year have brought tensions to the breaking point between Serbs and Croats--the two largest ethnic groups of Yugoslavia’s polyglot population. A war between them would dwarf Yugoslavia’s other ethnic differences.

Among the proud Serbs in this frontier town, who reserve a special respect for good fighters, Dragan is both a reassuring presence and a budding legend with a status all his own.

“He’s a professional,” explained Lazar Macura, who acts as the Krajina’s information minister, Knin’s deputy mayor and head of the local radio station. “Whatever he plans, it’s usually perfect.

“He’s a Serb, but I don’t know where he was born,” added Macura, with a hint of reverence.

Locals say the captain is married to his third wife, has three children, and has served in South Africa, Vietnam and the French Foreign Legion. Accounts of his victories in recent skirmishes with Croatian security forces are told with pride.

In a brief meeting at the police station here, Dragan confirmed only that he had undergone some military training in Texas and that his job was “just to ensure the safety” of his force.

But as tensions rise in the Krajina, safety has become a relative term. With an uneasy peace holding in Slovenia, Yugoslavia’s northernmost republic where recent fighting left more than 60 dead, worried eyes have begun to look farther south toward the Krajina and other mixed Serbian and Croatian areas.

Together, the country’s 10 million Serbs and 5 million Croats make up about 60% of Yugoslavia’s population, and their past enmity has heavily influenced the nation in the past. Relations between the two groups will largely determine whether Yugoslavia comes apart carefully and peacefully or disintegrates in chaos.

“As bloody as Slovenia was, it’s nothing compared to what would happen in Serbia and Croatia,” commented a veteran diplomat in Belgrade. “The fighting with the Slovenes was on principle (the issue of independence from the Yugoslav federation). There are no principles between the Serbs and Croats; it’s just a pure memory of hatred.”

Nowhere are memories stronger or longer than in this mountainous town about 65 miles north of the ancient port city of Split. Here Serbs and Croats for centuries have found themselves on opposite sides in a region where Christian and Muslim empires, Byzantine and Western civilizations and Eastern and Western ideas have all collided at times.

The word krajina means frontier.

To the south and east, Serbs inherited their Christianity from the Eastern Orthodox Church. They learned the Cyrillic script and were shaped in part by the Turkish Muslim empire they struggled nearly five centuries to overthrow.

Serbs fleeing Turkish rule were given land by the Hapsburgs to settle along the frontier where they provided an effective defense against the Turks.

Today, on this fault line of European history, Serbs and Croats are scattered randomly throughout the region, often in communities only a few miles apart.

To the north and west of the Krajina, Croats came under Hungarian and Hapsburg domination, taking the Latin script and their religion from Rome and their ideas from the European enlightenment.

Relations between the two have been punctuated by a conspicuously brutal kind of violence that runs well into this century. In 1928, for example, a radical Serbian member of Parliament became so enraged that he shot two Croat members, in one of the more extreme outbursts of an intolerance that eventually consumed Yugoslavia’s first attempt at democracy. The following year, Yugoslavia collapsed into a dictatorship under a Serbian king, Alexander. Croat extremists later plotted Alexander’s assassination.

During World War II, a Croatian Nazi puppet state unleashed a campaign of terror against the Serbs so severe that it even shocked Adolf Hitler’s brutal SS and led the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, to complain that the campaign was so intense that it had become counterproductive.

More than 400,000 Serbs are believed to have died during the war at the hands of Croatian extremists. On a single 1941 summer afternoon in Knin, 600 died, according to local residents.

Today the hatred is masked behind other issues.

Croatia’s nationalist government, with free-market aspirations and a strong desire for greater independence, wants to break out of a Yugoslavia dominated by a still-Communist Serbia.

Serbs here, angered by Croatia’s moves, last October declared the Krajina free from Croatia and asked to join Serbia, a move that heightened tensions between the two nationalities.

While Serbian authorities have not yet responded to the Krajina request, they talk ominously of protecting Serbian interests.

Croats have condemned the move as illegal and tend to view the Krajina as evidence of Serb aggression and determination to fulfill an age-old dream of a “Greater Serbia” at Croatia’s expense.

The Yugoslav federal government’s decision to send the army into Knin as de facto support for the Serbs confirmed Croat suspicion of a Serbian-dominated federal government and army.

Earlier this week, army forces were highly visible in the town, which serves as the self-proclaimed Krajina capital.

“Terrorists, bandits, that’s what they are,” sputtered Ante Krzelj, a Croatian tourist guide in Split, referring to the Serbs in the Krajina.

As emotions rise, many see more violence as unavoidable.

Arms are reportedly flowing into several groups in Yugoslavia, mainly from Eastern European countries, which have large surpluses of equipment.

Far from the European Community diplomats who helped forge a fragile peace in the north, Capt. Dragan focuses on an ambitious job: driving Croatian police and paramilitary forces out of the Krajina.

In an interview, Knin’s police chief, Milan Martic, said the Krajina had 7,000 police regulars, a reserve force of 20,000 armed with rifles and artillery and what he called “perfect relations” with the federal army there. “We have a common enemy in the fascist Croatian forces,” Martic said. “There have already been many battles.”

Croatia has a territorial force of about 40,000, said to be armed with machine guns, mortars and antitank guns.

Martic said the Krajina’s forces attacked Croatian police in the town of Licki Osik, 70 miles north of Knin, on July 2, killing 10 people. “It was our first offensive action,” Martic said. “The government of Krajina has delivered an ultimatum that all Croatian forces should leave or face attack.”

Earlier this week in the small Croatian village of Kijevo, only a few miles south of Knin, police armed with Soviet-designed Kalashnikov assault rifles also came under pressure.

As they stood around nervously after receiving reports of a brief firefight nearby, one female officer apologized for serving two guests warm water, noting that the refrigerator had gone out when Serbs had cut power lines two days earlier.

“Sometimes it is very quiet, then suddenly. . . ,” she started to explain, ending her thought by simply motioning toward the hills behind her.

So far, skirmishes in the region have been limited, but the weight of history, mutual suspicion and conflicting aspirations would seem to offer little encouragement for a peaceful future.

“There is worry that history could repeat itself,” Macura said.

So far, Serbs here claim to control five other towns and much of the countryside in the rugged, sparsely populated region, which makes up a quarter of Croatia but has a population of only about 200,000. About 60% are Serb.

The boarded-up fronts of Croatian shops attacked by militant Serbs are only one of the more visible signs of the growing division between the two ethnic groups. Most of those shopkeepers have now left, increasing the Serb dominance in a town that once saw the coronation of a Croatian king and served as the seat of both the Hapsburg representatives and Roman Catholic bishops.

Gradually, Serbs and Croats are cutting their ties, often without choice.

Knin high school student Igor Matijash, for example, was separated from his Croatian girlfriend when her family moved. He can’t visit her because Croatian authorities don’t recognize the personal identification documents issued in Knin.

Veljko Tanjga, 36, Knin’s railroad stationmaster, says trains from Croatia are fewer now and passengers even fewer. Gasoline is in short supply, local teachers and others on the public payroll have gone months without money and few speak of solutions.

Macura said he raised $70,000 from ethnic Serbs during a visit to Canada last month, but that money went mainly to purchase military equipment.

“It’s only going to get worse, worse, worse,” Tanjga predicted.

Indeed, for some, there is a sense of history repeating itself.

Tanjga pointed to the death notice displayed outside a Knin church of a 21-year-old Serbian youth killed in a recent clash with Croats.

“This boy’s grandfather died at the same place, from the same weapon fired by the same people,” he said. “The Croats don’t want peace.”

Croats in Split roll their eyes at the thought of driving anywhere near Knin or other Serb communities.

“They aren’t people, they are animals,” said Diana Vuoic, a young Croatian waitress. On the other hand, Serbs here say they are afraid in Split.

Split’s deputy mayor, Marin Mihanovic, is among those who believe that the present tensions will not trigger full-scale civil war. But he’s not taking chances.

“We’ve made bunkers and are prepared for bombing attacks,” he said, expressing the belief that if civil war does break out, the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav military would not remain neutral.

Those who know Yugoslavia well believe that Mihanovic is not overreacting.

Indeed, some fear that the army might try to take revenge on Croats for the bloody nose it received recently in Slovenia.

“I had hoped the deaths (in Slovenia) would be a kind of vaccination that could prevent more,” said a veteran Western diplomat. “Unfortunately, Yugoslavs have a large capacity for absorbing violence. They are very bellicose people . . . and one has the feeling there is still a lot more hostility to get out of their system.”