Deadlier War Feared as Croats and Serbs Battle

A raging battle between Serbs and Croats in a U.N.-protected area near the Adriatic Sea derailed Western-mediated peace talks here Sunday and threatened to plunge the remains of Yugoslavia into a fiercer and deadlier phase of war.

In violation of a promise to halt a 3-day-old military aggression, Croatian government troops infiltrated several miles into Serb-occupied territory near the coast and continued to fight along a 65-mile front.

The incursion and mounting casualties triggered international condemnation of the Zagreb leadership and provided Serbian nationalists from throughout the shattered Balkans with a pretext for distracting Western mediators in Geneva from a settlement of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina that few expect to be to the Serbs’ liking.

Rather than negotiating with the leaders of ravaged Bosnia over the borders for a forced ethnic division, U.N. mediator Cyrus R. Vance and his European Community partner, Lord Owen, spent the day trying to ward off Serbian threats of a massive escalation.

“We urged the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian Serb leaders not to get involved in Croatia at all,” Owen told reporters after juggling meetings and phone calls with Serbian and Croatian chieftains.

Vance and Owen insisted they had received assurances from Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic that Belgrade would hold back on threats of intervention to protect fellow Serbs in Croatia from harm at the hands of Croatian troops.

But the Yugoslav military chief of staff in Belgrade warned that federal troops are poised to invade Croatia, and a U.N. source at the conference here said that Cosic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic have made clear they are prepared for another round of bitter war.

“The army will undertake measures to defend the endangered Serbian people and extend humanitarian and all other help,” Gen. Zivota Panic, the Yugoslav army’s top officer, warned the U.N. peacekeeping mission, according to Belgrade Radio.

Cosic, architect of the “Greater Serbia” campaign that has killed at least 30,000 in 18 months of war, belittled the Western response to Croatia’s attack on the Serb-occupied region of Croatia known as Krajina.

“The response of the (U.N.) Security Council has been a mild and inefficient reprimand,” Cosic declared, demanding a Security Council debate on the crisis and a resolution ordering Croatian forces to stand down.

The Croatian operation, apparently aimed at securing a key route to the Adriatic Coast that had been cut off by rebel Serbs for more than a year, blew apart a detailed peace plan for Croatia negotiated by Vance 13 months ago and largely observed by the combatants.

Efforts to rescue the U.N. mission in Croatia drew the mediators away from the talks on Bosnia, where a 10-month-old Serbian offensive has displaced nearly half the republic’s population and left more than 100,000 missing and presumed dead.

“This seriously undermines and complicates the peace effort here,” Cosic said of the Croatian conflict. “There can be no peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina unless there is peace in the United Nations-protected areas in Krajina.”

Vance and Owen, joint chairmen of the Geneva peace talks on what used to be the Yugoslav federation, had been presenting the Croatian agreement as a model for settling the Bosnian crisis.

The mediators sought to shore up the crumbling foundation of their peace forum but conceded that discussions on a political reconfiguration of Bosnia were disrupted by the rekindled Croatian crisis.

Croatian government forces and Serbs backed by the well-armed Yugoslav federal army fought to a standstill in 1991, with the rebel Serbs taking one-third of Croatian territory in their six-month offensive.

The Vance Plan, as the Croatian peace accord came to be known, led to the deployment of 14,000 U.N. troops in the disputed territories but failed in its aim of disarming the Serbian rebel militias and restoring the region to civilian control.

It was frustration with the United Nations’ de facto protection of the Serbian land grab that motivated the Croatian invasion of Serb-held areas just east of the Adriatic port of Zadar.

A minister within the self-proclaimed government of Croatia’s rebel Serbs, known as the Republic of Serbian Krajina, warned of an imminent and uncontrollable outbreak of violence.

“We have the right to self-defense,” Boro Martinovic, the rebels’ legal and economics minister, said of the Krajina Serbs’ seizure of heavy weapons from U.N.-monitored caches. “Serbs would rather die than leave this territory. We will fight to the last man.”

Military commanders for the Krajina Serbs threatened to retaliate against Croatian cities if the offensive reaches Serb-held communities.

Croatian authorities have imposed a virtual information blackout on the conflict in their republic, and government troops along a 65-mile line extending inland from the town of Zemunik have barred U.N. forces, European Community observers and foreign journalists from the area.

Serbs fired shells on Zadar, and Croatian gunboats blasted Serb-held positions within range of the coast, U.N. sources here said they had been informed by military observers in the region.

Special correspondent Laura Silber in Belgrade contributed to this story.