13th Yugoslav Truce Looks Like All the Others--Broken

This country’s warring factions greeted their latest cease-fire with a hail of bullets Saturday, as federal warplanes bombed five Croatian towns and clashes intensified for control of the devastated city of Vukovar.

The 13th truce declared in nearly five months of Serb-Croat fighting was to take effect at 6 p.m.

But in the hours after the truce deadline, Serbian guerrillas and the Serbian-led federal army stepped up attacks on Croatian holdouts in Vukovar, which has been destroyed in the three-month Serbian effort to take it.

The cease-fire arranged between federal and Croatian negotiators, who have limited control over the combatants, was intended as a starting point to meet U.N. conditions for deployment of a peacekeeping force in Yugoslavia. Former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, the U.N. special envoy dealing with the Yugoslav crisis, is expected to begin a weeklong visit to the war-torn federation today.

Foremost among the U.N. prerequisites is a lasting cease-fire that would allow the “blue helmet” peacekeepers to deploy in relative safety.

A senior Western diplomat in Belgrade disclosed that “a lasting cease-fire” is being defined by U.N. officials as a minimum of eight weeks, a goal that he conceded is virtually hopeless in the current atmosphere of fear and vengeance.

Belgrade television showed footage of the latest clashes, with federal troops and Serbian irregulars flushing the Croatian resisters out of basements and bomb shelters in Vukovar and interrogating prisoners forced to lie face-down on debris-strewn floors with their hands tied behind them.

Houses visible in the background were roofless skeletons, every structure perforated by multiple grenade and mortar strikes. Television also showed several corpses of Croatian national guardsmen left along roadsides or at the edge of unharvested cornfields that provided cover during shootouts earlier in the deadly siege.

The news agency Tanjug reported that a 28-year-old Yugoslav journalist was killed Saturday in Vukovar, the 17th reporter known to have died in the fighting.

Croatian Radio reported sporadic artillery fire on the Adriatic resort of Dubrovnik, where a short-lived cease-fire late last week allowed 3,000 women, children, old people and wounded fighters to be evacuated by the ferry Slavija.

The overloaded ship docked in the northern Croatian port of Pula overnight.