Bullets Pierce Bosnia Truce, Hopes : Balkans: Cease-fire in Sarajevo fails to take effect. ‘I knew there would be no peace,’ weary refugee says.

Crowded around a park bench with other Bosnian refugees, Rabija Mirovic craned toward a scratchy radio Monday to catch word of how a cease-fire was faring in the Sarajevo neighborhood she fled less than a week ago.

The stoic, 61-year-old pensioner showed no sign of disappointment at reports of shelling around her suburban apartment block. The worry lines etched in her face seemed only to harden at the news, as if confirmation of her worst fears were some sort of comfort.

“I know there is a cease-fire today, but I knew there would be no peace,” the retired nurse said angrily, her eyes glistening but refusing to shed tears. “As long as the extremists are negotiating these agreements, there is no cause for trust.”

Serbian gunmen who have been attacking Muslim and Croatian communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina for the past three months had announced last week that they would halt their shelling of Sarajevo at 6 a.m. Monday so that U.N. peacekeepers could reopen the capital’s airport for humanitarian aid flights.

The Serbian warlord, Radovan Karadzic, had even offered to let foreign peacekeeping troops monitor his rebels in their hilltop nests to ensure that incoming planes would not be fired on.

But sporadic gunfire, sniper attacks and shelling of the suburb of Dobrinja shattered what little hope had been harbored by the estimated 300,000 still facing or resisting the Serbian assault and an equal number of Sarajevans who have fled to escape the slaughter.

“We don’t need food--we need weapons,” Mirovic declared on behalf of her fellow Sarajevans. “Sure, we are hungry, but this suffering will not end until we drive the aggressors away.”

Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic had dismissed Karadzic’s cease-fire announcement earlier as a delaying tactic to mislead Western mediators to believe relief was in sight.

Most of the 800 Bosnian refugees sheltered at Ljubljana’s abandoned Marshal Tito barracks share their foreign minister’s cynical view that those attacking Sarajevo are taking advantage of diplomats’ patience to starve out non-Serbs.

The homeless Bosnians, nearly all of them Muslim women and children, are uniformly pessimistic that anything short of a foreign invasion will stop the blood bath in their newly independent country, where nearly 6,000 have died in little more than three months of fighting.

“Why doesn’t anyone help us? We are victims because we were the ones without arms,” wailed Asija Masic, a 35-year-old textile worker from Bosanski Brod who has been on the run with her two daughters for three months. “We live for word that the world will stop this--the European Community, the United States, anyone who cares whether we survive.”

More than two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina has been seized by Serbian forces, many of them federal army troops cut loose from Belgrade’s command a few weeks ago and sent with their tanks and heavy guns to fight alongside the radical Serbs.

As the rebels opposed to Bosnian independence have taken over territory, they have expelled Muslims and Croats to create ethnically pure zones. The campaign has spawned more than 1 million refugees from the republic of 4.4 million, where none of the three ethnic groups amounted to an outright majority.

Sarajevo Radio reported a few hours after Monday’s cease-fire was to have taken effect that 20 shells had been lobbed into the Dobrinja suburb and that a dozen grenades had exploded in the rubble of the capital’s ancient center.

The latest disappointing truce joins more than a dozen others that fell to pieces within hours, sometimes minutes, of their scheduled start.

Few from Bosnia expect any relief from the bloodshed as long as Serbia’s nationalist strongman, President Slobodan Milosevic, remains in power.

Milosevic has been politically rattled by U.N. sanctions ranging from an oil embargo to suspension of trade and transport with Western countries. Demonstrations demanding his resignation have become daily occurrences in Belgrade, with 10,000 students turning out Monday to denounce him for driving the country to ruin.

But Serbia’s loyal propaganda organs have skillfully deflected responsibility for the sanctions. They allege that Serbs are suffering because of an international plot to subjugate Serbia, stirring defiance and hardening resolve to conquer territory for an enlarged Balkan state to unite all Serbs.

The systematic seizure of Bosnian territory is aimed at linking the republic of Serbia with Serbian-held areas of Croatia, where 10,000 died last year in a similar territorial war portrayed as an ethnic conflict.

Milosevic’s campaign for a Greater Serbia, in which all 10 million Balkan Serbs could live together, gained momentum Monday with the election of his nationalist ally, writer Dobrica Cosic, as president of the newly declared but unrecognized Yugoslav state.

The new two-republic Yugoslavia, which links only Serbia and tiny Montenegro, was announced by Milosevic in late April. “Federal” elections for a new Parliament were held May 31, but an opposition boycott dropped turnout to only 56%.

Cosic, 71, was among those who spearheaded a 1986 nationalist revolt against the former Yugoslav order, alleging that late leader Marshal Tito designed the postwar federal system to benefit Slovenes and Croats at the expense of the more numerous Serbs.

The 12-nation European Community and the United States have recognized the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina but not of Macedonia and the new, smaller Yugoslav state.

EC foreign ministers meeting in Brussels failed again Monday to persuade Greece to drop its objection to Macedonian independence. The Athens government insists that only its northern Greek province has the right to call itself Macedonia and refuses to accept any country claiming that name.