Croats Joining Bosnians in Battle Against Serbs : Balkans: Officially, Croatia isn’t helping. But joint defense pact apparently encourages open involvement.

GRUDE, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Guzzling a beer between battles in the undeclared war for a Greater Croatia, Marinko Zadro breaks ranks with his brothers in arms and admits he takes his orders from the Zagreb-based Croatian National Guard.

The official line from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, is that no Croatian military formations are deployed in newly independent Bosnia-Herzegovina, a foreign country in the throes of war. Croatian government officials insist that those bearing Croatian nationalist insignia and laying siege to Serbian communities are Bosnian Croats simply acting in defense of their families and homes.

But throughout the predominantly Croatian regions of western Herzegovina, the checkerboard flag of the Republic of Croatia flutters from public buildings, armored troop transports with Croatia’s HV markings rumble along the rocky, sun-scorched roads and armed irregulars who answer to a Zagreb-based nationalist warlord fill the cafes and man the roadblocks.

“Croatia goes all the way to the Drina” River, insists Zadro, a lanky, unshaven vigilante whose concept of geography stems from Croatia’s World War II-era fascist regime.

Other Croatian fighters in this noisy military staging ground claim that they have no political motive for defending their Bosnian brothers.

Some say they are fighting only because no Western power is willing to protect Bosnian Croats and Muslims against a Serbian onslaught that has taken nearly 6,000 lives in three months and given most Bosnian territory to the aggressors.

“Of course, Croatia is helping us. Someone has to,” said Sahib Lovancic, 27, a truck driver from Sarajevo on a mission to fetch food for his starving family and neighbors. “We are surrounded by Chetniks (Serbian irregulars) who shell us day and night. The West ignores our tragedy and believes in these cynical cease-fires.”

From the border town of Imotski, Croatian national guardsmen outfit volunteers and organize them into fighting units, busing the impromptu warriors to the front lines near Mostar, along the Neretva River.

Most Western countries have condemned Serbia for a merciless aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina. But U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has also accused Zagreb of fomenting ethnic bloodshed. In a report on the war last month, Boutros-Ghali demanded that all Croatian troops return to Croatia.

But Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic announced Tuesday that his embattled republic had entered into a joint defense pact with Croatia, apparently encouraging open involvement by the Croatian army.

“We do not see Croatia as the aggressor because (its forces) recognize the supreme command of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Izetbegovic told a news conference in Sarajevo, broadcast to these western reaches of his republic via Zagreb’s Croatian television.

The Serbian-run Tanjug news agency claims that at least 35,000 Croatian troops are fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Zagreb officials have dismissed the figure as exaggerated and denied they control those fighters who are here.

But leaders of the ultra-nationalist Croatian Party of Rights openly concede that they direct thousands of guerrillas in Bosnia-Herzegovina committed to annexing the whole republic to Croatia and recovering the borders taken by force in 1941.

HOS, the party’s military wing, has “liberated” at least half a dozen Serbian villages east of the Neretva in the past week, said HOS spokesman Mario Mihailovic, meaning that Serbs had been expelled from the territory.

“This is all very legal,” Mihailovic insisted from his party’s headquarters in central Zagreb, where the ostensibly illegal HOS forces brandish automatic weapons in public with impunity. “Everybody who wants to fight for his country has the right to do so. We just give them structure and guns.”

While the HOS forces wear clearly identifiable insignia, distinguishing Bosnian Croats from volunteer fighters from Croatia is complicated by nearly identical emblems. Some fighters, like Zadro, wear no signs of allegiance on their camouflage at all.

The inconsistencies provide an out for Croatian President Franjo Tudjman when he is faced with foreign accusations, as in the case of recent U.N. reprimands, that the Zagreb government is aggravating Bosnia’s ethnic war.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has directed the same kind of proxy war from Belgrade, and much more effectively due to the vast Yugoslav federal army at his disposal. After deploying more than 100,000 federal troops into Bosnia-Herzegovina over the past year, the army high command loyal to Milosevic demobilized and disbanded the forces last month and sent them with their tanks and heavy artillery to join Bosnian Serbs in their rebellion against secession.

Bosnian Serbs, who account for 31% of the republic’s 4.4 million people, oppose independence because they want to stay with other Serbs in the remnants of the Yugoslav federation.

With the exception of the HOS soldiers, Bosnian Croats tend to be more circumspect in discussing the political future of their republic than are Bosnian Serbs, who openly call for annexation with Serbia. But many in western Herzegovina appear to be counting on eventual union with Croatia.

“This is Croatia. The Muslims are just Croats of a different religion,” insisted a 27-year-old fighter in Grude, explaining his view that no separate state was warranted for the Muslims who make up 44% of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s population.

Croatian guardsmen and irregulars who have come to Bosnia-Herzegovina’s defense have posted some successes over the past week in turning back Serbian territorial conquests along the Neretva. Mostar has been recovered for the majority Muslims and Croats, according to local fighters.

But the Croatian offensives have displaced Serbian civilians and reportedly involved summary executions, exposing the Zagreb leadership to international charges that it has violated human rights and the rules of war as Milosevic has.

Western diplomats say Croatia’s involvement in the conflict is dwarfed by that of Serbian forces. But they have warned Tudjman that foreign mediators will not consider that two wrongs equal a right and have threatened to impose on Croatia the same economic sanctions strangling Belgrade.