Borders Are Barrier for Bosnian Refugees : Balkans: Fleeing the war, most find that inundated Croatia has closed the door. Many must hole up in camps.

Tomo Vidovic elbows past a throng of fellow refugees at a blacked-out transit station and peers into the open door of an idling bus. He haggles with the driver over the cost of passage from this front-line city to nearby Croatia and with the border police who ride shotgun for the 15-mile trip.

Turning back to the darkened station, he rouses his wife and mother from their slumber among the luggage to tell them they won’t be accompanying him across the border.

Vidovic has an Austrian passport and a home abroad that could house his family, who have just completed a grueling, seven-day escape from defeated Jajce. But until he can produce documents proving that his wife and mother will only be passing through, the Vidovic women will not be allowed into Croatia.

Whether Austrian authorities will issue a guarantee that will satisfy officials in Zagreb is an open question. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have massed at the Croatian border with the same vain hopes of securing foreign help in escaping the war. Instead of a haven, they encounter a new form of wartime triage. The few lucky ones with foreign passports, like Vidovic, are allowed to pass freely into Croatia.

Those who claim to have sponsors abroad are informed by Croatian border guards that they must first secure official letters of invitation, a bureaucratic nightmare for indigent refugees in an unfamiliar city that has neither working telephones nor reliable mail.

And for homeless Bosnians who wish only to survive by fleeing shelling and the squalor of life on the run, there is no choice but to hole up in a packed border camp and pray for a change of heart among foreign governments averting their eyes from Bosnia’s crisis.

Croatia has been inundated with more than 700,000 refugees from the Balkan conflict that began more than a year ago when Serbs rebelled against independent Croatia. Since the war spread to Bosnia in April, the refugee situation has exploded, with more than 2 million made homeless by combat and “ethnic cleansing,” the largely Serbian practice of expelling Muslims and Croats from areas the Serbs conquer.

Overwhelmed by the costs of accommodating the displaced, and angered by Western indifference, the Zagreb government stopped accepting Bosnian refugees two months ago, causing the most recently expelled to pile up at border towns like this one.

“These people have nowhere else in the world to go, which is all the more tragic because that was the aim of those who chased them away. That’s what they wanted with their ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ” said Father Gabriel Mioc, rector of a Roman Catholic church and monastery.

Mioc’s churchyard is a sorrowful way station for Bosnians caught between the advancing Serbs and the closed Croatian border.

Old women, children and furloughed fighters, exhausted by their dangerous exodus, sleep on the trampled grass. Desperate mothers rummage through cartons of donated clothing for their children; others cluster around aid workers doling out food. The ground is littered with empty cans and crushed containers. There is a pervasive stench of human waste.

Stjepan Marjanovic is a Bosnian Croat who serves with the Croatian army in the city of Slavonska Pozega. Now that his family has been expelled from their home in the central Bosnian village of Dobratic, he hopes to be allowed to resettle them near his post.

“I didn’t know it would be so difficult to get my family beyond the border,” said Marjanovic. “Even if we can get permission to enter Croatia, we have no money and no way to travel.”

Most of the displaced from central Bosnia left with few possessions. Their cars were often destroyed in the shelling or confiscated by the victorious Serbian guerrillas, leaving only tractors and donkeys as a means for survivors to flee.

The refugees’ impoverished status has made them all the less welcome in Croatia, which is reeling under the load of those displaced earlier in the Balkan war that began in June, 1991, with the secession of Slovenia and Croatia.

Some Muslims complain that they are blocked from escape while Bosnian Croats more easily gain temporary refuge in Croatia. While aid workers and Zagreb officials deny that they give preferential treatment to Bosnian Croats, they concede it is often easier for the Croats to secure foreign invitations. Croats account for the largest share of former Yugoslavs working abroad, which gives them a pool of potential sponsors.

“We were one of the last spots on the road of safety, which is why so many come here to escape,” said Red Cross worker Adela Skaro, estimating that Tomislav Grad has been the crossing point for at least 35,000 people since April. “Now, even those with letters of invitation have trouble leaving because they have no money or transportation.”

The situation in Tomislav Grad is dire but hardly unique. An archipelago of refugee camps has emerged along the Bosnia-Croatia border, flooding towns like Capljina, Ljubuski, Posusje and Livno with similarly large numbers of wandering poor.

Moreover, Muslims and Croats are not the only refugees trying to flee Bosnia. A bus driver for the Red Cross was wounded by a mortar shell Wednesday while returning to the capital, Sarajevo, after taking Serbs to a suburban meeting point from which they were to head to Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and what is left of Yugoslavia.

The Red Cross subsequently canceled any evacuation of civilians from Sarajevo, apparently ending a two-month effort to take away thousands of women, children, elderly and wounded because of food shortages and a lack of heat and shelter.

The Red Cross has been battling resistance to the convoys from the military forces of all parties.

In Tomislav Grad, Josefina Dojdar, a 58-year-old Croat, waited to learn her fate after a seven-day journey by foot and tractor from Jajce. She wants to join her son and grandchildren in the eastern Croatian city of Pakrac.

But because her kin are refugees themselves, they have no right to sponsor her. “I want to leave, but I’m told I can’t go anywhere without a guarantee,” she lamented, referring to Zagreb’s demand for documents attesting to a host family’s ability to provide for Bosnian relatives.

Tomislav Grad had a prewar population of 30,000 and now hosts as many as 15,000 refugees, according to Mioc, the Catholic rector. They spend their days wandering the town’s few commercial streets to ogle goods they cannot buy, scurrying at the sound of each general alert siren to bomb shelters and to log lean-tos designed to stop shrapnel. At night they bed down on blankets and cardboard at hastily converted public buildings, like the day-care centers no longer needed because most industry has been shut down by the war.

“Most of the recent arrivals have been taken into private homes. The hearts of people in this community are very large, so they will be well cared for,” said Mioc. “But for those in public buildings, there is not enough attention to hygiene, and the risk of disease and epidemics will grow as winter progresses.”

A typhoid epidemic has already struck the refugee-packed port of Split, with at least 20 cases of the disease diagnosed among recent arrivals from Bosnia, said Josip Esterajher, a senior official of Zagreb’s Office for Displaced Persons and Refugees.

He defends Croatia’s decision to close its borders to all but Bosnians who have invitations from abroad or relatives who have convinced a screening committee that they have the means to care for guests.

“We’ve had many problems with people who are themselves on social welfare offering to sponsor as many as 40 others,” said Esterajher, himself a refugee from eastern Croatia. “We have to take care that these refugees don’t put our nation in a state of social catastrophe.”

Croatia, a country of fewer than 5 million, is already supporting more refugees than all Western countries combined. Diplomats confirm the figures cited by Esterajher and echo his criticism of developed countries that refuse to shoulder their share of the burden.

“Unless something is done to resolve the conflict in Bosnia, this country could be sunk by another 500,000 or 1 million refugees,” warned one Zagreb-based envoy.