Neighbors Turn Into Enemies in Tenja : Croatia: A farmer and a sniper are caught up in violence that has shattered a once peaceful town.

It was just another lazy Sunday afternoon in this farming town caught in Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

The shooting began around 4.

This time it was a Serb sniper who started it, firing on a Croat farmer trying to sneak back home to feed and water his pigeons.

Croatian police quickly answered with a long burst of automatic weapons fire. By 4:30, more than 100 rounds had been exchanged between the police, ensconced on the community’s outskirts, and a group of lightly armed Serbs, barricaded nearer to the town center.

Between them lay an eerie no-man’s-land of about 600 yards where the only through street was littered with wrecked vehicles and lined with deserted, hastily boarded-up homes.

Along what was once a busy arterial road, nothing moved but a few chickens, a goose and a stray cat.

A handful of reporters who approached the Serb barricades carried white flags and moved gingerly in cars marked “Press.”

As the afternoon waned, the distraught and confused farmer sat on a concrete step near the Croatian police lines, alternately cursing and sobbing with his head in his hands.

Those on both sides of the divide agreed that more shooting would follow once darkness came.

Life has been this way in Tenja for over a week now--since the first convulsion of violence broke loose early on the previous Sunday.

It is only one of several communities paralyzed in recent days by violent clashes between Serbs and Croats, Yugoslavia’s two largest ethnic groups, who live intermixed in small towns and villages in eastern Slavonia, a region just inside Croatia’s border with the Serbian province of Vojvodina.

On Sunday, this violence spread elsewhere as Serb-Croat fighting left two dead and several wounded in villages farther west, near the Croatian capital of Zagreb.

Although still small in scale, these skirmishes are filled with age-old rivalries between Serb and Croat that could burst into full-scale civil war if a European Community-brokered plan fails to achieve its goal of a peaceful redefinition of the Yugoslav state.

Here, in the heat of a July afternoon, there seemed little optimism on either side that the answer would be provided by EC observers, due in the region this week to monitor a shaky cease-fire.

In Tenja, as elsewhere, the emotions seemed too intense, the distances between the two groups too small.

A Croatian police officer named Dado asked, “When and if all this mess is cleaned up, how are we going to go back and live together in the same town again?”

When another officer was asked if he knew or was close to anyone beyond the Serb barricades, he smiled and answered, “Yes, I’ve got a brother-in-law, is that close enough?”

Behind those barricades, an array of Serbian youths and men ranging in age from 15 to 60 and armed with a mishmash of pistols, rifles and automatic weapons talked of their desire to be part of Serbia now that Croatia has declared its independence from the Yugoslav federation.

They are no match for the Croatian police, but the presence of the Yugoslav army led by mainly Serbian officers only a few miles away helped preserve the standoff.

“We’ve got food, electricity and water, but they’ve cut off the phone lines and we don’t have enough weapons or ammunition,” said Nemanja Subotinovic, 29, who has a farm near the town.

“The future doesn’t depend on this town,” he said. “It depends on what happens to the political structure of Yugoslavia.”

At an International Red Cross office in the nearby Croatian city of Osijek, frightened refugees from Tenja told how neighbor turned on neighbor once the fighting began.

A 23-year-old Croatian woman too frightened to give her name said that her lifelong next-door neighbor, a Serb, suddenly appeared at her door armed and in uniform and told her to stay inside.

She and her family fled the next day. “I have no idea what we’ll do now,” she said.

A Red Cross official said that 664 families had sought refuge in Osijek from strife-torn surrounding communities in the past 10 days.

Tense conditions have undermined the normally lucrative tourist season in Osijek. The city center, usually overflowing with vacationing families and young people enjoying the long, sultry summer evenings, is now deserted by 10 p.m.

When a stray round from an army tank gutted a 7th-floor apartment on the city’s outskirts eight days ago, some residents decided it was no longer safe for their children.

Fearing more fighting and a possible army move against the city, local radio journalist Sanja Rabuzin last week sent her 10-year-old son to stay with relatives in a town near Zagreb.

“In Zagreb, there is peace,” she explained. “Here, there is war.”

Despite the animosity, the two sides occasionally share lighter moments, such as an exchange of chatter Sunday between Croatian police and armed Serbs on a shared police radio frequency.

Among the comments:

Croat: “What kind of beer are you drinking?”

Serb: “Three or four kinds, one of them from Zagreb.”

Croat: “Have you tried the beer from Osijek?”

Serb: “We don’t have it yet, but that will be ours too.”