Shells Bring War’s Reality Back to Croatian City : Conflict: Weary residents of Dubrovnik flee, facing uncertain future as refugees.

After the heaviest night of shelling since the start of this year, hundreds of baggage-clutching refugees, a dozen trucks and a coffin awaited escape Wednesday when the overdue ferry Ilirija docked at Dubrovnik harbor.

Lulled into wishful thinking that the worst of the war was behind them, the 50,000 residents of this shell-shocked seaside paradise have suddenly been reawakened to the reality that the price for leaving Serb-led Yugoslavia has not been paid yet.

Like the rest of the splendid, cypress-shaded Dalmatian coast, usually abuzz with thousands of tourists, Dubrovnik this year is a scene of violence and panic.

Each day for the last three weeks, dozens of shells have soared from behind the coastal mountains and exploded on roads, houses and hillsides.

Others have killed civilians in the city and fighters on the slopes, like the ill-fated youth in the coffin. The mahogany box, adorned with a crucifix, was escorted by six guerrillas onto the Ilirija for a final journey home to another coastal city.

The Ilirija’s other passengers were also headed for uncertain futures, joining the swelling and sorrowful ranks of Yugoslavia’s 2.2 million refugees.

“There’s no limit to this war. We thought the shelling was over, because it was relatively quiet earlier this year,” said Marje Skuric, who rode out the past 10 months of sporadic conflict in her native Dubrovnik, only to be driven out now by the maddening frustration of never knowing when it will end.

“Now it’s as bad as it was last year, when we all had to hide in the cellars,” said the slender mother of two dressed in designer sportswear and sunglasses. “We would like to stay, but I can’t risk my children’s safety any longer.”

Skuric, 7-year-old Maro and 6-year-old Lucrecia took refuge with relatives in Cavtat after their home in Cipili, near Dubrovnik’s airport, was sacked and burned by the Yugoslav federal army last October. When Cavtat was razed a few weeks later, they joined thousands of others huddled in shelters within the fortified walls of Dubrovnik’s Old Town.

On Wednesday, after what she described as the most terrifying night of shelling since attacks on Dubrovnik resumed last month, Skuric kissed her fighter husband goodby at the quayside and hustled the children aboard the Ilirija, intent on waiting out the war on the peaceful island of Korcula.

“We don’t have any family there. We’ll have to live on social assistance,” Skuric said, losing her composure at the thought.

For the women of Dalmatia--Croatia’s Adriatic coastal region dotted with limestone villas and populated by prosperous entrepreneurs accustomed to credit cards, microwave ovens and European vacations--life as a homeless refugee will demand coping skills they had never developed.

In the Croatian capital of Zagreb, refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina are living in abandoned railroad cars. Hungry women towing ragged children comb the outdoor cafes near the train station, silently displaying identity cards to show where they fled from, too embarrassed and demoralized to verbally beg for dinars to buy food.

During the Ilirija’s call in Split, one homeless Bosnian mother was seen lowering her scrawny toddlers into a dockside garbage bin to forage for returnable bottles and scraps of uneaten food. Another begged along the line of cars waiting to board the ferry, her right breast exposed to show she was nursing the sleeping infant perched on her hip.

“It’s tragic what has happened to us, and no one will help us,” said Zvjezdana Gjaja, who has taken refuge from the Dubrovnik fighting at her brother’s summer home on the island of Mljet.

“We all pray we will be able to go back to the city by the time school starts. The children already missed so much last year,” said the emaciated 37-year-old, gesturing to her two elementary school-age children.

Uncertain how they’ll survive in an unheated summer house if forced to spend the winter, Gjaja grows increasingly worried as each day’s Ilirija docking brings reports of ever-fiercer shelling of the Dubrovnik home she left last fall.

Dubrovnik is of no strategic value to the Serbian and Montenegran guerrillas who have been pummeling it off and on since October. Its harbor is too shallow for the federal navy boats now crowded into Montenegro’s Kotor Bay, and tourism was the only industry along the narrow strip of Croatia on which Dubrovnik sits.

But just south of the walled city is the Prevlaka peninsula, which guards the entrance to Kotor Bay. Serbs fear that Croatian positions there could hamper access to the new Yugoslavia’s sole military port. That accident of geography is considered the driving force behind the assaults on Dubrovnik.

Most of the destruction visited on the Dalmatian coast has been concentrated on the 20-mile stretch of vacation land extending south from the walled city, along which nearly every Croatian house has been plundered and burned.

Dubrovnik’s cherished Old Town has been spared a full-fledged pounding but suffered damage to its main cathedral and the Stradun marble promenade during last year’s three-month siege.

Several of the shells fired in the long night that ended set more houses inside the walls ablaze.

“The Serbs are jealous of us because we have this beautiful city and the sea,” said Gjaja, in the Mljet port of Sobra, where the shelling of her abandoned home city was audible even 25 miles away. “If they can’t have it, they don’t want us to have it either.”

She laments the political extremism that has driven Serbs and Croats to fight a hopeless and unwinnable war. Most of the responsibility for 17,000 deaths and the legions of homeless she lays at the feet of Serbia’s nationalist strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, but she concedes that the Zagreb leadership is also to blame.

“Our leadership has come on too strong with its own nationalism. I think there were times when we could have acted differently and maybe this war wouldn’t have happened,” she said dejectedly.

Petar, an unemployed waiter, exudes the same anguish over the Yugoslav tragedy of Yugoslav making.

“No one in the world is going to help us because no one can understand this war,” said the displaced Dubrovnik resident, also escaping the war amid the serenity of Mljet.

“How could sane people in the civilized world understand such an insane conflict? This is something only the madmen who started it can comprehend. It’s just sad that so many of the rest of us are being ruined as well.”