In Serbia, Standing Up to the Ethnic Cleansers : Balkans: Defiant Croats, joined by sympathetic Serbs, spearhead a resistance movement to campaign of terror.

A dozen bomb blasts in the neighborhood, threats of rape against their three daughters and the demands of radical Serbian nationalists for public denunciation of neighboring Croatia haven’t yet compelled Antun and Slavica Rakos to flee this town that their Croatian families have called home for 400 years.

“Nowhere in the world can you find ethnically clean territories, and I hope this town will not become one, either,” Slavica Rakos said.

She led a delegation of local residents about 40 miles to Belgrade last week to protest threats and mistreatment of minorities in Serbia, where a campaign of terror has already driven away thousands in what is feared to be another outbreak of “ethnic cleansing”--a predominantly Serbian drive to create ethnically pure areas.

“We are not leaving from here until we are carried to the cemetery,” the defiant farm woman insisted. “We have nothing to do with Croatia. We abide by the laws of the Serbian state because we have no other. Our consciences are clear. Besides, where else would we go?”

Since ethnic fighting erupted in the spring of 1991 in the old Yugoslav federation, authorities have reported 18,000 fatal casualties, most of them civilians. Reports from some local authorities, as well as from the U.S. State Department, say the actual death toll is at least twice that number.

In addition, according to U.N. figures, at least 2.3 million people have been made homeless as a result of the fighting and the “ethnic cleansing.”

Non-Serbian families like the Rakoses who live in the ethnically diverse western regions of Serbia’s Vojvodina province report threats against their lives and organized harassment, like grenades lobbed into their yard at night and anonymous telephone calls warning of trouble.

“One of the callers yesterday said he would rape my daughters and that if I didn’t stop talking to the press someone would kill me,” said Slavica, who is spearheading an informal resistance movement, which includes sympathetic Serbs.

“People are made to sign ‘voluntary’ statements giving away their houses while they have guns pointed at their heads,” her husband added.

In the town of Hrtkovci, 70% of the variegated population has been chased away by nationalist terror, including the murder by decapitation of one man of mixed nationality who refused to go.

Likely prompted by an international outcry against forced expulsions across a broad swath of former Yugoslavia, Serbian officials have over the past week taken a few symbolic steps to stop minority harassment.

But targets like Julijana Molnar, a Hungarian peasant who has refused to flee despite death threats, say the hatred of Serbian radicals is so intense that not even Belgrade can protect them. Some dismiss the recent official interest as maneuvering to persuade the West to lift economic sanctions and deter foreign governments from threatened military intervention.

Political leaders in the region estimate as many as 10,000 people have been intimidated into leaving the fertile plains of Vojvodina, where centuries of migration have deposited successive waves of Czechs, Ukrainians, Ruthenes, Italians, Germans and Jews in addition to the Balkan Slavs.

The harassment is believed to be the work of a radical minority, but because Serbs who disagree with the concept of “ethnic cleansing” also fear the wrath of the brutal extremists they often remain silent in the face of excesses, residents of the Ruma region said.

Attempts to drive out Vojvodina’s non-Serbian populations have grown apace with the number of Serbian refugees arriving from war-torn areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some Serbian authorities, including Serbian National Movement leader Mirko Jovic, see a solution of the refugee problem to be expulsion of non-Serbs and resettlement of Serbian newcomers in those homes.

In May, another ultranationalist warlord, Vojislav Seselj, stoked up a rally of his Serbian Radical Party in Hrtkovci by vowing that all those who were “disloyal” would have to leave. A local supporter then read out a list of non-Serbian families, most of whom have since fled in terror.

One who refused to run was 42-year-old Mijat Stefanac, a man of mixed Croatian and Hungarian origin. A few days later he was taken away by a group of Serbian militants from among the recently arrived refugees and found with his head severed from his body a few miles down the road.

Since then, more than two-thirds of Hrtkovci’s 4,000 residents have succumbed to the pressure to flee, and hundreds more are seeking to sell or swap their homes to escape what they see as imminent danger.

Evidence of the fear propelling the Hrtkovci exodus is contained in hundreds of hand-lettered signs tacked to city-center walls and windows pleading for buyers of the houses they feel they must leave.

Residents like Molnar, a 44-year-old peasant whose two grown children have fled to Croatia, say life has become a tense Bosnian-style standoff between Serbian hard-liners who want exclusive run of the town and those who want to preserve its integrated, multiethnic heritage.

The proponents of tolerance have been aided by growing resentment over greed and corruption on the nationalist side.

Ostoja Sibincic, the radical Serbian mayor, had been bilking incoming refugees of fees running to several thousands of dollars for “liberating” a home from non-Serbs in which the newcomers could live.

“Now some of the refugees have joined us,” reported Antun Rakos, adding that the growing outrage over Hrtkovci has also prompted Yugoslav federal officials to promise relief.

The Rakoses led the delegation of locals and frustrated refugees to Belgrade on Wednesday to press Serbian and Yugoslav authorities for action to deter ethnic aggression.

Special police forces from Belgrade arrived Thursday and took Sibincic into custody the following day, triggering a night of rampaging by Serbian radicals.

Local activists within the fiercely nationalist parties headed by Seselj and Jovic argue that non-Serbs can stay only if they denounce what the Serbs see as hostile regimes in neighboring countries, specifically Croatia and Hungary.

“Those Croats who live here have not distanced themselves from the genocide crimes committed by the government of Croatia,” said Miodrag Brasic, a local leader of the Serbian National Movement, which blames Croatia for provoking the Yugoslav war.

Asked what non-Serbs would have to do to prove their loyalty to the leadership in Belgrade, Brasic replied, “Something public, maybe a rally or a press conference and declarations that they have no problems here.”

The non-Serbs who fear the eventual objective is to force them to go elsewhere contend they are under no obligation to denounce foreign governments or express support for any Serbian political figures.

“It’s not as if we had started a Croatian political party here,” said Tomislav Gajger, a Croat whose family, including three young children, was the target of a June bombing that narrowly missed the house but killed their dog.

“We did nothing to stick out,” he said of his family. “We were just citizens of this town trying to make a living off the land.”