NEWS ANALYSIS : Yugoslav Truces Only Provide Lull for Reloading : Civil war: Serb-Croat bitterness and hatred have overtaken logic. Foreign intermediaries find themselves powerless.

Before the ink was dry on the latest Yugoslav cease-fire accord, Serbs were pounding eastern Croatia with artillery and Croats had tightened a siege of federal army bases, a siege they had pledged to disband.

As the presidents of Serbia and Croatia met with European mediators in The Hague to promise sincere efforts to resolve their war, Croatian national guardsmen were rigging key roads and bridges with mines and tank traps, and the Serbian-commanded federal army was moving in reinforcements.

Each announcement of a breakthrough in Yugoslavia’s intractable ethnic bloodletting has been met with increasing cynicism by combatants determined to carry on with the fight. Each declaration of a cease-fire has merely provided a lull during which both sides regrouped and reloaded.

The war in Yugoslavia, which has already claimed at least 1,000 lives, has fast become Europe’s own Lebanon. Bitterness and hatred have overtaken logic, and foreign intermediaries have been powerless to enforce peace.

“Our mistake has been to assume that the protagonists would negotiate in good faith,” said one exasperated mediator from the 12-nation European Community, forced to take cover in a Zagreb hotel room while awaiting a stable cease-fire he was sent in to observe. “ . . . They promise one thing during the talks, then they immediately go back on their word.”

A dizzying volley of truces declared and truces shattered has eroded both the mediators’ patience and any basis for trust. With little reason to hope for a lasting halt to the fighting, the EC’s 200-member monitoring team is talking about going home.

Each broken promise has added to the resentment and thirst for revenge that is propelling the war, opening a new and more brutal phase of fighting.

The EC’s threat to pull out and leave Serbia and Croatia to resolve the crisis--likely only after a vicious settling of age-old scores--spurred another claim of agreement Thursday, when the Serbian and Croatian presidents met in The Hague.

Yugoslavia’s Serbian-commanded army agreed in principle to withdraw from Croatia within a month. In return, Croats pledged to end their blockade of federal bases. The two republics, Yugoslavia’s largest, also agreed to negotiate a peace treaty that would address the claims of Croatia’s Serbian minority that it is mistreated by the nationalist regime.

While the accord had the immediate benefit of calming the gun battles that defied Tuesday’s cease-fire, its terms are patently unacceptable to both leaders, reinforcing suspicions that the politicians are just buying time.

Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek said the army pullout and lifting of Croatia’s blockades “should be carried out immediately, on both sides, as we speak.”

But with the one-month deadline for compliance, full and swift moves were not expected.

A genuine resolution of the deadly crisis has eluded the mediators for three months, primarily because neither of the principal players can accept the political costs of peace.

For Croatia’s President Franjo Tudjman to abide by a cease-fire, he would have to accept the status quo. Nearly half of Croatia’s territory has been occupied by Serbian militants, spurring waves of Croatian refugees that now number in the hundreds of thousands. To stop fighting now would cede vast stretches of land to the rebels and cut off Zagreb from its once-lucrative Adriatic coast.

If Serbia were to follow through on the promise of President Slobodan Milosevic to allow full retreat of the army, the Serbian rebels would be too weak to defend their land grab against the routed Croats.

Although there are 600,000 Serbs among Croatia’s 5 million people, more than two-thirds of them have been scattered throughout the republic, living in communities where they were outnumbered by Croats.

As Croatian anger over the deaths and destruction in the republic has intensified in recent weeks, many Serbs who were previously assimilated in Croatia have fled in fear of random retaliation for what the army-backed militants have done.

Serbs remain haunted by memories of the last independent Croatian state, a Nazi puppet regime that oversaw the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies during World War II. Those atrocities provoked retaliation by Serbs and Communist partisans at the end of the war, when tens of thousands of Croats were executed for having collaborated with the fascists.

In Yugoslavia’s caldron of long-simmering grudges, the current fighting has picked up where the last Serb-Croat conflict left off.

The result of three months of bloody clashes has been the radicalization of both populations. Death has touched many households, and each side blames the other for setting off the war.

Shortly after The Hague agreement was announced late Thursday, both the federal defense minister and Croatia’s President Tudjman gave conflicting interpretations of what they were expected to do.

Tudjman implied that he would take part in peace talks only if his republic was accorded equal status with the federal army negotiators, which would amount to recognition of Croatian independence.

Yugoslav Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic said the army pullout would depend on whether the ensuing negotiations show any success.

Milosevic praised the one-month deadline as “realistic.” But the Communist strongman believed to be masterminding the army’s bludgeoning of Croatia has heaped praise on other EC-brokered agreements at the same time his Serbian guerrillas were out breaking them.

With economic devastation looming for both republics when they do put an end to their war, there is little incentive for either Tudjman or Milosevic to turn their peoples’ attention away from the fight.