Yugoslavia, EC Open New Quest for Peace Today : Diplomacy: A conference in The Hague will draw European leaders and heads of the six republics.

This divided nation will lay a trunkload of ancient scars and fresh wounds at Europe’s door today as its concerned neighbors launch a last-ditch effort to halt ethnic fighting that threatens to explode into Europe’s worst violence since the end of World War II.

Meeting in Brussels on Friday, foreign ministers of the 12 European Community nations voted to open a peace conference in The Hague today, even though a truce that was to be its precursor is being widely violated inside Croatia.

There were new clashes and more deaths Friday in fighting between Croatian forces and advancing Serbian irregulars, sometimes supported by the Yugoslav army, reports from the battle area said. As usual, each side accused the other of shooting first.

Croatia seeks independence from the dying Yugoslav federation. Neighboring Serbia, the largest of Yugoslavia’s six republics, says Croatia may go but that 600,000 Serbians, a minority there, must have the right to remain under Belgrade’s rule.

Like the irregular units who claim to have “liberated” large swaths of Croatia, the hard-line Serbian government calls for a redrawing of Croatian frontiers. Croatia says its borders are inviolable.

On that issue will the peace conference turn, and--observers fear--founder.

Represented by their presidents, the two antagonists and heads of the other restive republics will meet with leaders of the new Europe six days after unanimously agreeing to a cease-fire that nobody has observed. The continued violence nearly short-circuited the peace conference, but European ministers decided Friday to press on.

“If we can’t silence the guns, let the guns not silence us,” said Dutch Foreign Minister Hans Van den Broek, who jawboned a reluctant Serbia into signing the peace accord Monday.

The EC has committed its prestige to the peace effort, but in light of unflagging Yugoslav hostilities, the mood in Brussels on Friday was understandably glum.

“We cannot just give up,” said Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, Denmark’s foreign minister.

“It will be the meeting of the last chance,” said Mark Eyskens, his Belgian counterpart.

The EC wants to dispatch unarmed observers to Croatia to monitor a cease-fire as the first step in a peace process. Some observers are already in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, but diplomats say they will not be deployed until a cease-fire takes hold.

The EC plan also proposes a five-member arbitration panel to sort through conflicting Serbian and Croatian grievances. The EC has already named jurists from Germany, Italy and France to be its representatives on the panel. Yugoslavia is to name the other two from any country within the EC. But, in another sign of the collapse of federal authority, the collective eight-member Yugoslav presidency was unable to agree on two panel members at an acrimonious meeting here Friday.

Serbs and Croats, Slav cousins who share the same language, are divided by history and religion. Most of the Serbs are Orthodox, most of the Croats are Catholic. They fought on opposite sides in both world wars.

In World War II, thousands of Serbs were massacred at the hands of Croatian fascists who ruled a puppet Nazi state. After the war, the two communities lived uneasily in a one-party state welded together by communism and administered by no-nonsense Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

After Tito’s death in 1980 and the collapse of Yugoslav communism in 1989, old antagonisms revived under fiercely nationalist regional governments in both Croatia and Serbia.

All Yugoslav and international efforts to halt quickening violence, which is sounding echoes of the savage Serbian-Croatian civil war waged as a sideshow to World War II, have failed. About 2 million Yugoslavs died during that war, about half of them killed by Germans, and the other half killed by fellow Yugoslavs.

In fighting Friday, Serbian irregulars continued to shell Croatian strongholds in eastern parts of the republic in an apparent attempt to force their evacuation and to sever road and communication links with Zagreb.

The Croatian government said at least 16 people were killed in fighting in the town of Osijek, where shelling damaged homes, schools and a Catholic church in the center of town. Croatian leaders accuse the army of supporting the irregulars, but army spokesmen insist that Yugoslav units are deployed as a buffer between the warring groups and fire only in self-defense.

New casualties were also reported Friday in Vinkovci, about 30 miles from Osijek, and near Okucani, along the Belgrade-Zagreb highway, which was blocked by Serbian irregulars Friday for the third day.

Croatian officials said 10 people died near Gospic near the Adriatic coast, raising the death toll in the breakaway republic to about 400.

Times staff writer Joel Havemann, in Brussels, contributed to this report.