Thugs at Door Send Bosnian on Hellish Odyssey : Balkans: Ivica Matkovic was 175 pounds when seized by the Serb militiamen who invaded his town. A month after being freed, he weighs 125.

According to Ivica Matkovic, 39, and his pregnant wife, Vesna, 27, everything was normal in their city of Doboj, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, right up until the morning of May 4, when the ethnic cleansers came to town.

A city of about 35,000, with a peacefully coexisting mix of Muslims, Serbs and Croats (respectively 40%, 36% and 14% of the population), Doboj stands in the path of a corridor of land the warring Serb militias want to carve out across northern Bosnia.

On that May morning, Serbian militia fighters, wearing red berets and festooned with weaponry, manned street crossings at intersections in the city and launched a reign of terror that, according to its former residents, has reduced the population to about 15,000, leaving behind only about 1,000 Muslims and Croats.

The homes and apartments of virtually every fleeing Croat and Muslim have been looted and trashed. Scores of Muslim and Croatian homes have been burned.

The ordeal of the Matkovices, who are Croats, began on the third morning after the Serbian guerrillas arrived, when 23 of them burst into the family’s flat, smashed up the furniture, kicked in the television set, ripped pictures from the walls. Money and jewelry were scooped up into bags.

While Vesna Matkovic looked on in horror, the thugs smashed baby bottles and a crib (Vesna was six months pregnant at the time), then broke Ivica’s nose with a rifle butt.

Ivica Matkovic was taken from his apartment in handcuffs, beaten and kicked nearly senseless on the lawn of his apartment building, in full view of other residents, and thrown into the baggage compartment of a waiting bus. About 50 other residents of the area, Muslims and Croats, were jammed in the baggage hold with him, he said.

Matkovic, who told his story Wednesday in Zagreb, spent almost the next two months in what can only be described as a Serbian-run gulag for Croatian and Muslim men.

“First I was taken to a prison, in the city,” Matkovic said. “They asked me who was supplying arms to the Croatians and Muslims. Of course I could not know this. So I was beaten again. Then I was put in a jail cell, about 15 feet by 9 feet, with 30 other men.”

He spent 30 days there. The prisoners were given about a quart and a half of water to share daily, except when one sympathetic jailer sometimes slipped extra water to them. Rations were at starvation level. Toilet facilities consisted of one bucket, emptied as needed.

“Ten men died there during the 30 days,” Matkovic said. “They died of starvation or of the wounds from their beatings.”

Then the prisoners were transported from the jail to the local army base and stuffed into a metal-walled truck garage. It was big enough, he said, to accommodate two army trucks, about 60 feet long and 20 feet wide.

“There were 560 men inside this garage,” he said. “There were shelves along the walls, where some could sleep. It was worse than the jail. In 15 days, I had one slice of bread, with marmalade, to eat.”

There was random terror.

“The Serbs would get drunk and fire their weapons into the garage, shooting through the shelves where people slept,” Matkovic said. “The first time they did this, nine were killed and 30 were wounded.”

The shooting incidents, he said, happened “five or six times,” although not as many were killed as in the first incident.

He was moved again, after 15 days, to the basement of a private house that had been converted into a discotheque. About 350 men were jammed into the basement, and the Serbs turned on the heating unit, apparently to increase the prisoners’ agony.

Here, Matkovic said, he was fed once in 13 days--another slice of bread with jam.

On July 3, Matkovic was released from the jail in a prisoner swap arranged by the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia. When he was arrested, Matkovic weighed about 175 pounds. He now weighs 125.

With most of the attention focused on the siege of Sarajevo, the Serbs--engaged in what has come to be known as “ethnic cleansing” of areas under their control in Bosnia--have descended on dozens of outlying towns and villages whose communications to the outside world have been cut.

European Community officials and refugees say the story of Doboj, and the experiences recounted by Matkovic, match accounts from a dozen or more towns and cities in northern Bosnia.

Vesna Matkovic had stayed in Doboj. For her and the other remaining Croats and Muslims, mainly women and children, she said, the town was like a prison camp.

“Muslims and Croats were free to go out in the morning between 8 o’clock and 11,” she said. “If you were out after that, there was a roving bus that moved through town, and you would be put on the bus, arrested and beaten.

“After 11 a.m.,” she said, “you did not dare to go to the window or onto the balcony of the apartment, because they are shooting at people from the street.”

Vesna Matkovic also got out of Doboj with the assistance of a U.N.-arranged prisoner exchange, on June 27, after nearly two months of living in a place cut off from the rest of the world, and with no idea whether her husband was dead or alive. Taken to Croatia with other refugees from the town, she found her husband’s brother, who pressed authorities for information about Ivica. They were reunited after his release.

The Matkovic family and other refugees from Doboj are being assisted in Zagreb now by the Doboj City Club, a volunteer group formed by former residents of the city, of all ethnic backgrounds, who are trying to find shelter and assistance for those driven out of their hometown. Similar clubs have been formed here in the Croatian capital for a score of towns across Bosnia.

Now hollow-cheeked and gaunt, Matkovic wants to join the Croatian army after he regains his health. He wants to drive the Serbs out of the town where he was born and where he had spent a largely peaceful life. He has no argument, he says, with the Serbs who lived in Doboj.

“Most of them were horrified at what was happening,” he said. His argument is with the thieves and looters and thugs, who came from other places with little more than violence and greed behind their “ethnic cleansing” rationale.

However crude and brutal, it is effective. Matkovic says he never wants to return to Doboj to live. Even when the battle to retake the town is finished--if it ever is--”I won’t go back.” He says he will settle in Croatia.