COLUMN ONE : Dirty War of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ : Muslim Slavs have been robbed, beaten, thrown out of their homes and imprisoned by Serbian militiamen. Their accounts suggest a clear pattern of persecution.

While visiting his son in Visegrad in eastern Bosnia earlier this summer, Delic Suljo, a 65-year-old retired factory worker from Gorazde, learned what the twisted term “ethnic cleansing” has come to mean to some here.

Suljo’s story isn’t easy to hear. It provides a glimpse, however, into how some have carried out the terror, thuggery, theft and murder that have engulfed the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and made an estimated 2.2 million citizens of the former federation refugees.

Both sides in the Yugoslav civil war--Croats and Serbs--have been accused of committing atrocities as they have tried to capture and control disputed territory, much of it--especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina--in areas where Muslims, Croats and Serbs long have lived together in harmony.

But world attention has been riveted in recent days by new allegations of Serbian brutality--ugly conduct that has been likened by some to Nazi-era horrors and chillingly linked by statements of some Serbian leaders about what they call “ethnic cleansing,” the removal of non-Serbs from areas claimed by Serbs.

This process began in Visegrad, said Suljo and Vanica Basija, 68, a Visegrad resident, when Serbian militiamen moved in a day after the former Yugoslav National Army stopped shelling the town. The soldiers drove through Visegrad with loudspeakers mounted on trucks, urging citizens, “Remain loyal!”--to what was not made clear--and “Do your work and you will not be harmed!”

The militiamen, Suljo said, then moved through the city, street by street, with lists of residents on which Muslim names were readily identifiable. When the Muslims--or, in some cases, Croats--were not identified or listed on the post office register, simple terror could be used to induce some Serbian residents of Visegrad to identify their Muslim neighbors.

Sometimes, according to Suljo and other refugees, the Serbian neighbors were willing accomplices. But in some cases, the Serbian neighbors--among whom they have lived all their lives--were horror-stricken and did what they could to help.

From the upper floor of his son’s house, Suljo said he watched from May 12 to June 15 as Serbian militiamen murdered scores of unarmed civilians on the bridges at either end of the town’s main street. They heaved the bodies into the river, he said.

On June 16, the Serbs, with their lists, came to Suljo’s street.

“They called everyone out from the houses,” he said. “They told us to wait until they brought the truck. But I had already seen where the truck went, and we got very scared. And 11 of us tried to get to the Red Cross. As we were going, two (Serbian guerrillas) came from behind us and stopped us. At that moment, we were 40 yards from the old bridge. . . . And then we heard a car stop, and someone in the car, another (soldier), yelled at them to leave us alone. They had an argument. One in the car said, ‘Let them go; they are too old.’

“Then the two of them marched us to a nearby schoolyard,” Suljo said, “and started to interrogate us about our sons and daughters. . . . When I said I was from Gorazde, one of them hit me with a clenched fist to the nose. Then my nose started to bleed. And then they kicked me with their boots and broke three of my ribs. . . .

“They ordered me and one other older man to go in front of them,” he recalled. “And I thought for sure they were going to kill us on the bridge. We were walking in front of the hotel where most of the (militiamen) were sleeping. There was a body there, in the street, of a man whose head was almost destroyed. . . . (A soldier) ordered us to drag him to the bridge. We dragged the body, by the legs, to the bridge, and they ordered us to throw him over.

“When we came on the bridge,” he said, “we saw a brain, a human brain. . . . The (soldier) made the other man pick it up and throw it in the river. . . . There were two more bodies on the bridge, men whose throats had been cut. He ordered us to throw these two bodies into the river.

“As I was in poor condition, with my ribs broken, and the other man very old, it was very hard to do, and he kicked us a few times,” he said. “So we managed to throw these two bodies, as well. When we finished, we were covered in blood, all my clothes soaked in blood, head to foot.”

In an evident act of leniency for their labor, the militiamen spared Suljo and his companion that day. The next morning, he managed to flee to the town’s Red Cross office, where local people--Serbs, Suljo hastened to point out--helped to get him out of town, to relative safety. “You ask why they are doing this,” Suljo said of his bloody ordeal at the hands of the militiamen. “They are doing it because we are Muslims.”

Pattern of Expulsion

Detailed discussions with a score of the 500,000 Muslim Slavs who have been robbed, beaten and thrown out of their homes in eastern and northern Bosnia, sent to prison camps and then, finally, to refugee centers in the heart of the country or in neighboring Croatia vary only in detail and suggest a clear pattern.

“They stole everything we had of value, or they destroyed it,” said Vesna Matkovic, 27, a Croatian from Doboj, a town with a 40% Muslim population in northern Bosnia.

As she tells it, on May 7, a squad of 23 armed Serbian militiamen, all of them from outside the area--as nearly as she could tell--burst into the Matkovic apartment in Doboj. The soldiers, she said, demanded all their money and valuables and beat up her husband, Ivica, 39.

He spent the next seven weeks jammed into a jail, a garage and an overheated basement with more than 500 other Doboj residents, Croatian and Muslim, Ivica said. He was beaten and lost nearly 50 pounds. Dozens of men died during the ordeal, he said, beaten to death, starved or shot.

“The Serbs would get drunk and fire their weapons into the garage, shooting through the shelves where people slept,” he said. “The first time they did this, nine were killed and 30 were wounded.” There were “five or six” such shooting incidents, he said, although the casualty rate was not as high as the first time.

Vesna Matkovic was left behind in a smashed-up apartment and was able to witness, as Suljo did, some of what happened in the following days, mainly to the houses and property of those who had been taken away by the Serbian gunmen.

“First,” she said, “they took everything. Everything valuable. Sometimes the furniture. And then they set fire to the houses. I saw about 20 houses, every day, burned. And if they weren’t satisfied with burning, they blew them up with grenades.”

Samira Majdanic, 21, a refugee in Zenica, in central Bosnia, told reporters last week of being forced to burn down her own house in a neighborhood in Kozarac, a town in the northern sector of the republic.

When she finished with her own house, she was taken in tow by the guerrillas and forced to burn 10 other dwellings. While in the custody of the militiamen, she said, she saw furniture from houses in her village stacked in a school building.

From there, she was taken to a prison camp in Trnopolje, inhabited mostly by women and children and old men, where, she said, young women were regularly taken out of the camp and raped by the Serbian guards.

A Shocked World

Journalists, diplomats, U.N. officials and others who have been watching events in the former Yugoslav federation over the past two to three years say they have no reason to doubt the veracity of the accounts offered by the Bosnian refugees.

The refugees’ stories and the television pictures taken last week in a prison camp at Omarska, in northern Bosnia, have shocked the world and put new pressure on Western political leaders to intercede, however gingerly, in the Balkan crisis. But seasoned observers here have seen it coming and have said so.

“I guess this is what it takes,” said one international agency official, “to wake the world up.”

Historically, the Balkans have long been a troubled area, violence-prone.

“Once communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia was bound to disintegrate,” historian Paul Johnson wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently. “But it might have done so with little loss of blood had it not been for the misjudgments of Western diplomats. Yugoslavia was always an artificial creation, put together by Britain and France at the end of the First World War to compensate their ally, Serbia. It never really worked, because the desire of the military-minded Serbs to run a profitable empire conflicted with the irreconcilably condescending aim of the more advanced Croats and Slovenes to ‘civilize’ the Serbs.”

That “unworkable” nature of the federation broke into the open as the Western-oriented Slovenes, moving to the temper of the times, tired of a socialist federation dominated by a Communist Serb leadership and struck, a year ago, for their independence, skillfully laying the military and diplomatic groundwork for secession.

But at the same time, the Serbian leadership in Belgrade, clearly anticipating the fallout from the Communist collapse in the region, had begun to scratch at the scab of Yugoslavia’s deep-seated nationalist sores.

Communist strongman Slobodan Milosevic, willing to unleash Serbian ethnic extremism to stay in power when Communists on all sides were being discarded, started with the province of Kosovo, largely inhabited by Muslims of Albanian origin.

As the Slovenes declared independence, the Croats, with their own nationalist-minded leader, Franjo Tudjman, had no choice but to secede, as well. With Serbian nationalist feelings already running to a fever pitch, the ensuing war, briefly with Slovenia and then over most of the last year with Croatia, was, experts say, virtually inevitable.

But how does that account for the concept of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, an area where Muslims (41% of the population), Serbs (31%) and Croats (17%) have lived, mostly in harmony, since the end of World War II?

In the view of longtime observers of the slowly building Yugoslav crisis, it has been made possible by the Belgrade regime’s willingness to promote the notion of a “Greater Serbia,” evoking both ancient boundaries and more recent grievances from World War II, when Croatia sided with the Nazis and both sides killed each other with grim abandon.

Ferocious Warlords

Of predominant importance in the “ethnic cleansing” operations are a number of nationalist militia leaders, among them Zeljko (Arkan) Raznjatovic, who runs an ice-cream parlor in Belgrade and commands a fierce squad of gunmen known as “Arkan’s Tigers,” and Vojislav Seselj, who claims the loyalty of several clans of Serbian militiamen.

These two leaders are not alone but compete in ferocity with a dozen warlords whose fighters are notorious for their brutality.

Journalists who have been covering the conflict over recent months have seen convoys of looted goods, loaded on trucks, headed back into Serbian territory. One U.S. journalist saw an entire lumber yard cleaned out and the valuable wood sent toward Belgrade, presumably to be sold, at a hefty discount, to a Serbian dealer.

Serbian voices raised in protest against the militias have been silenced, their speakers even assassinated. The Belgrade press is muzzled.

If Serbs living in Bosnian towns don’t comply voluntarily with demands of militiamen (to identify their neighbors or join in the “cleansing”), they are forced to go along or be killed. Still others, as statements of refugees indicate, find themselves caught up in the aggression, in the general undertow of emotional appeals to old historical grievances and willingly take custody of their neighbor’s cow or tractor or flock of goats.

As for the Serbs, they have accused Croats of forcing Serbs out of Croatian-controlled areas. Bishop Atanasije Jeftic of the Serbian Orthodox Church, for example, has asserted that all Serbs have been driven out of Croatian-held areas on the western bank of the Neretva River in western Herzegovina, the Associated Press has reported. Their homes, as well as churches and monasteries, have been destroyed, the bishop has said.

But for observers here, the people who clearly have borne the brunt of and been blind-sided worst by the cruelty in Bosnia have been the Muslims.

Hakia Jakupovic, 66, lately a reluctant resident of a secondary-school gymnasium in Zenica, was a Muslim resident of the northern Bosnian village of Babici, occupying one of three Muslim houses in a settlement that was mostly Serb.

On June 3, six of his neighbors, all Serb and all well-known to him, came to his house. They rode a tractor, which pulled a wagon.

“They took us to Omarska, the prison camp,” he said. “Me, my two sons, my grandson, who is 22, and a cousin. They didn’t tie us up, or beat us. We rode on the wagon.”

They left the women behind. Jakupovic, his sons, grandson and cousin spent 41 days in Omarska and watched as some people were shot, some starved and some beaten to death.

And then, this happened, for which there seems no more explanation than for what went before: “A Serb friend of my son came to the camp. He told us that our women were OK. Then he arranged for us to be loaded on trucks and taken to Trnopolje, and there we found our women. They said the Serbs in the village had sent them to Trnopolje, and they said they would take our things, our equipment, our cow and our mare and its foal, and they would keep them for us. They said, ‘We will milk your cow.’ ”

Even now, as he sits in borrowed clothes, in a schoolhouse that is his home for the foreseeable future, he is not certain what his neighbors meant.