Serbs Retreat After Bloody Bosnia Independence Clash : Yugoslavia: Thousands of young marchers break up vigilante barricades. Five deaths are reported.

After firing on peaceful demonstrators in a Monday clash over Bosnia-Herzegovina’s right to seek independence, militant Serbs later abandoned their barricades, which had held the city hostage throughout the day.

About 5,000 youthful marchers plowed through the militants’ heavily armed roadblocks around 9 p.m., after three fellow protesters had been felled by gunfire and one was reported to have died of those wounds. Four others were killed in earlier gun battles, hospital workers said.

The Serbian militants left Sarajevo as swiftly as they had appeared only 24 hours earlier to defy a vote endorsing secession of this central, multi-ethnic republic from the Yugoslav federation.

Their retreat eased fears that Yugoslavia’s civil war was about to consume volatile Bosnia. But tensions remained high, and Serb political leaders warned that ethnic warfare was unavoidable. Sporadic gunfire still crackled early today; the cacophony of automatic weapons shots tapered off, however, after the militants packed up their barricades and went home.

“It was the strength of the people that broke them,” Esko Hadjatmetovic, a proud 19-year-old law student, declared as he and other youths celebrated the removal of the barricades.

No traffic had been allowed in or out during the day because of the blockades, which some reports said came down after negotiations with Bosnian officials. Incidents involving armed Serbs--some believed to have come in from other republics--occurred throughout the city, including in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Hotel. One of more than a dozen gunmen who took up positions inside the hotel fired several submachine-gun rounds toward youths who had berated them for menacing guests. No one was injured.

Bosnia’s presidency and government had condemned the vigilante action by the militants, which had paralyzed the capital, and a senior officer of the Yugoslav federal army branded the armed uprising against secession “sheer banditry.”

A government crisis committee had rejected any use of force to clear the streets of roadblocks and the militants, citing an explosive “psychological atmosphere” that the committee said would best be eased with negotiation. Police set up observation posts near the Serb barricades but made no effort to disperse them, apparently choosing to wait out the rebels.

Then the spontaneous student action drove them away.

About 1,000 people, some carrying children, marched on the main roadblock around 7 p.m., bearing loaves of bread in a peace offering and calling on the militants to release Sarajevo. Most scattered when they were confronted with an eruption of gunfire in which three were wounded, one fatally, according to the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug.

The protesters regrouped, swelling to at least 5,000, and marched along Sarajevo’s main Marshal Tito Boulevard, chanting support for ethnic unity.

“I want the world to know that not all Serbs are like those who built these barricades,” said Dajan Dimitrejevic, a Serbian graphic artist taking part in the march. “No one ever expected anything like this. We must speak out against violence.”

Earlier on Monday, Muslims who had taken up arms to protect the historic city center had dismantled their roadblock, ceding security to the government and police.

Sarajevo’s usually bustling streets were nearly deserted--except for the rebels--for most of Monday as authorities urged people to stay home and indoors. Most shops and cafes were closed, though some proprietors stood guard over their locked premises with rifles ready.

Automatic weapons fire and grenade blasts erupted throughout the day from the militants manning the roadblocks, some masked and in camouflage gear, others wearing jeans and parkas. From atop the closest ridges of the Ozren and Jahorina mountains that flank this city along the Miljecka River, machine gun-toting sentries fired random shots across the valley.

Ethnic tensions in Bosnia soared over the weekend after authorities conducted a two-day referendum, in which Muslims and Croats, who together account for more than 60% of the population, endorsed independence over staunch objections from Serbs. Many feared that the armed Serbian revolt, although it involved no more than a few hundred people, could spread the Yugoslav civil war to this ethnically diverse republic.

The Serbian-controlled federal army has tens of thousands of soldiers deployed in Bosnia, where most of the former Yugoslav federation’s defense industries are based.

Initial indications suggested that the army would not move in to support the rebel Serbs, and Gen. Miodrag Kukanjac, commander of the military region based in Sarajevo, denounced the attempt to prevent secession as “an act of sheer banditry.”

Because no single nationality has a majority in Bosnia and most of its communities are mixed, some fear that ethnic fighting here would be even more disastrous than in Croatia, where warfare has killed 10,000 since last June.

Ethnic Serbs, who are about 31% of Bosnia’s 4.4 million people, are mostly opposed to the republic’s intention to join Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia in breaking away from Yugoslavia. The Serbs want to remain aligned with Serbia in what is left of the Balkan federation. Of the six republics, only Serbia and Montenegro want to remain aligned.

“We cannot accept any independence for Bosnia-Herzegovina. If this happens, I’m afraid we cannot avoid an inter-ethnic war,” Radovan Karadzic, the leader of Bosnia’s Serbian community, said in a television interview from Belgrade. He was in the Serbian capital to consult with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, his longtime friend.

“Let this be a warning,” Karadzic said, referring to the roadblocks set up by his supporters. If foreign governments recognize independent Bosnia, he warned, “Yugoslavia would burn.” He earlier told Radio Sarajevo that “if this conflict (at the barricades) develops into civil war, the Irish problem will seem like a seaside holiday by comparison.”

The confrontation in Sarajevo, an integrated, tolerant city of 600,000 previously bereft of ethnic clashes, was sparked by an armed attack Sunday on a Serbian wedding party, which had paraded nationalist banners through the city’s old Muslim quarter. One man was killed and a Serbian Orthodox priest was injured in the shooting, attributed to two Muslims and a Croat, all three still at large.

Some Serbs used the incident to justify encircling the city with roadblocks and issuing demands aimed at derailing the independence drive.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, on behalf of the republic’s multi-ethnic leadership, condemned all criminal actions committed in Sarajevo and elsewhere since the referendum. The presidential statement appealed for calm and restraint.