Croatia Fighting Intensifies; U.N. Steps Up Efforts

Air strikes and artillery barrages rattled Croatia on Monday in intensified fighting in Yugoslavia’s 6-month-old civil war.

“It’s worse than hell today,” a Croatian officer said from a police station in Otocac, a town in the mountains above the Adriatic Sea.

“The barracks where our guards are stationed were hit by rockets from the air,” he said. “A number of our guys are injured; some civilians as well.”

An estimated 6,000 people have been killed in fighting that began when Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, prompting an army-backed rebellion by its Serbian minority.

In an attempt to coordinate efforts to end the fighting, Lord Carrington, the chief European Community mediator, and Cyrus R. Vance, the U.N.’s special envoy, held talks in Lisbon with Portugal’s foreign minister. Portugal assumes the EC’s six-month rotating presidency Wednesday.

The truncated, Serbian-dominated federal government in Belgrade issued an appeal to all involved in the fighting to halt armed operations at once and called on “all Yugoslavia’s citizens and people of good will in Europe and throughout the world to contribute to the establishment of peace.”

On Monday, it appealed to the EC to treat Yugoslavia’s internal borders as administrative lines, “an open issue that can be a topic of negotiations.”

It said: “We see great hopes for peace in the readiness of the United Nations to send a peacekeeping force to Yugoslavia.”

Vance was on his way to Belgrade and reportedly plans to stay in the region for at least a week. This morning, he is scheduled to meet with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Federal Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic and members of a special state committee for liaison with the United Nations.