‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Legacy: Place Where None Can Live : Balkans: On both banks of a river separating Bosnia and Croatia, it’s hard to tell the winners from the losers.

It’s hard to tell the “cleansed” from the “cleansers” in the territory around this town as it waits now with a palpable tension for the next stage of war, or war’s aftermath.

It is hard to tell which side has won or lost here, or which side is prisoner or refugee-in-waiting. The Una River runs along the town’s edge, but since it marks the boundary between Serbian-held Croatian territory and Serbian-cleansed Bosnia, no one is allowed to swim there this year. It is just one more imposition in this scorching and heartbreaking summer.

On the river’s northern bank, where battles were fought for three months last year, the roadway has taken on, even at high summer, that curiously autumnal look that comes after war has slouched past, the tree limbs scorched and barren, leafless silhouettes against a hot, flat sky. Lizards skitter in the dried leaves blown up against the foundations of the broken houses, but there are no people here. Perhaps this is true “ethnic cleansing,” a place where no one can live.

The prize at the end of this road, on the Croatian side, was Kostajnica. After a battle between Serbian forces and Croatian defenders that ran from June to mid-September, the prize itself is largely a ruin, its serpentine main road a testimony to the cleansing power of high explosives, liberally applied. One bulldozer, on Thursday, chewed slowly at a mountain of broken limestone, loading one battered dump truck, a fitful beginning of reconstruction.

“No one has won anything here,” said a Serbian man in Bosanska Kostajnica, referring to the larger war--the one last year across the river and the one now flaring across Bosnia-Herzegovina. “We’ve all lost, and we will be losing for years. It is a nightmare.”

Both of these Kostajnicas, divided by a river that was once meaningful only as a place to fish or go swimming in summer, seem caught in the warp between a war that has somehow not quite ended on one side and not quite begun on the other.

It is a nether zone where the writ of established order no longer runs, where gunmen on both sides of the river terrorize their neighbors, where the police seem pawns to forces and bosses they can never quite pinpoint beyond somewhere “higher up.”

“Crime? There is none,” said the chief of police in Bosanska Kostajnica. “Nothing.”

The chief declines to give his name. “Unnecessary,” he says, which, in the unconscious poetics of the place, seems a fitting handle. The heavyset chief, who is the head of the local Bosnian Serbian party, the SDS, endures these questions impatiently as sweat dampens the strands of hair combed across his bald head.

“The mosque,” he says, “now that was something different.” That was not crime, he means, strictly speaking. He unlocks a cabinet beside his desk and displays two broken pistols and a Kalashnikov assault rifle, which he said came from the mosque.

The mosque, which served a Muslim population here that once numbered almost 2,000, is now rubble, but it was attacked, piecemeal, over a period of three or four weeks, with “unknown extremists” blasting away at it, in the middle of the night, until its minarets tumbled and its roof collapsed.

More than half the Muslim population has now gone, evacuated in a convoy of buses and cars, about a month ago. About 850 remain, and they want to leave as well, but no one will take them. In the meantime, their cars have all been taken from them.

By and large, these were not poverty-stricken people. The men worked, the children went to school. Some farmed, some ran businesses. Now many of them have signed over all their property, sometimes to Serbian authorities, sometimes to Serbian friends--”good Serbs,” they call them, people they have known all their lives--in the hope that someday they will be able to return.

In the heat of midday, under the shade of the back-yard grape arbors that grace many houses here, there is much talk of “good Serbs” and of the suffering that they are enduring here, along with everyone else. It was a band of “good Serbs” who, in May, actually took up arms against a band of “bad Serbs” bent on killing Muslims in the neighborhood called Uzica, just beyond the mosque.

“We took guns,” said one of the men who defended the Muslims. “We took our own guns and stood in front of them, made a line across the street.”

Of course, they could not stand there forever, and in the following days the first explosions echoed from the mosque, late at night, and sounds of gunfire from carloads of “bad Serbs” drove through the Muslim quarter, firing their weapons into the air. And, bit by bit, the mosque came down. The Croatian Catholic Church was also attacked, a one-shot affair, a Molotov cocktail through a window. Badly charred, its walls still stand.

The question of who is a “bad Serb” is not an easy one. Some say they are “extremists” who come from surrounding villages; and yet most people here, caught in the struggle to survive and the almost impossible effort to make the issue of ethnicity irrelevant, know that many of their neighbors would have to be called “extremists” as well.

“You have to understand that we have no law here,” said one woman, herself the product of a mixed Serb-Croat marriage. “We have people here who before the war were nothing. You must try to understand this. These people did not work. They drank. They were maybe small criminals. They were no good then, and everyone knew it, and they were nothing. And then this horrible thing came along, and they took up a gun. Maybe they declared themselves loyal to someone or some group, and now they have power. They do what they want.”

It was a such a man, the woman says, who came to her father one day in his garden in Croatian Kostajnica, pointed a gun at his head and said, “I will change your face.” She and others, she says, know this man--who is about 30 years old and “completely crazy” and is responsible for several killings in the town across the river--but he remains beyond the grasp of intimidated citizens and cowed or co-opted police.

This woman’s best friend, a Muslim woman of the same age, tells a similar story about her own parents, who were well-to-do merchants in Croatian Kostajnica before the war, but who have now fled to Zagreb. Her aunt and uncle, now in their 60s, remain in the Muslim quarter of Bosanska Kostajnica, where they have lived all their lives.

“My aunt says they can take everything--the TV set, the car, everything--if they can just stay in their house. That’s all they want.”

This young Muslim woman is safer than most of those of her ethnic background, less likely to be thrown out of her house, because she is married to a Serb, a man of 27 who has been drafted into the Serbian army and is now, she believes, with front-line troops near Deventer, in northern Bosnia. There, in the irony and agony that will be this war’s enduring wound, he faces a battle against Muslim forces bent on breaking through the Serbian corridor across the region.

People here acknowledge both the insanity of the war and the challenge--perhaps impossibility would be a better word--of putting things back together again.

They remember that last year, before Serbs took Kostajnica, Muslims helped Croats loot Serbian homes. They know, too, that Serbs will take revenge for that, and for Serbian grievances against Croats and Muslims in World War II, memories never far below the surface here.

In the meantime, the war footing that pervades both sides of the river takes its toll. On the Croatian side, as on the Bosnian side, food supplies are low. The Serbs, stretched by the war, cannot adequately supply the area they took over last year. Their prize town is blasted and blighted, without telephones or electricity. And Croatia, vanquished for the moment, is not lending any assistance.

In Bosnian Kostajnica, about 2,500 Serbs, fewer than 1,000 Muslims and a handful of Croats get along with no electricity, no central water supply, no phones. There is no refrigeration, so there is virtually no meat, no milk.

Supplies that are forwarded by the Red Cross wind up--perhaps not so mysteriously--being offered for sale in shops operated by favored citizens.

The dry summer nights go by under a welter of stars, the streets darkened except for the pale candlelight flickering through the windows of the houses. Along the blackened corridor of the street, voices can be heard from some house down the way, bearing the closing arguments from the bottom of a bottle of plum brandy; and now and then comes a gunshot or two, its direction uncertain.