Serb Gunships Hit Croatians in Counterattack

Serbian rebels attacked southern Croatia with helicopter gunships on Wednesday in fierce retaliation against a Croatian government offensive, igniting what appears to be a second round of all-out war for the disputed Krajina region.

The raging conflict in Serbian-occupied Krajina and new outbreaks of fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina forced thousands more civilians to flee their homes and blocked food shipments destined for hungry Bosnians.

The Serbian counteroffensive marked the first use of combat aircraft in the region since Croatian forces ruptured a year-old truce Friday by invading Serbian-held territory near the Adriatic Sea port of Zadar.

Serbian rebel commanders in Knin are known to have at least six helicopters equipped for combat--they were ceremonially bequeathed to the rebels by the Yugoslav federal army when it withdrew from Croatia last April.

Intense artillery and sniper fire around Benkovac, southeast of Zadar, was reported to have trapped at least 20 French soldiers with the U.N. peacekeeping force, U.N. spokeswoman Shannon Boyd said. Kenyan soldiers were dispatched in armored personnel carriers on a mission to find and rescue the French.

Boyd also reported that dozens of unarmed U.N. police and military observers were put under house arrest by the combatants, ostensibly for their protection but probably to prevent any foreign attempts at deterring the battles.

Gen. Satish Nambiar, commander of the 23,000 U.N. troops deployed in Croatia and Bosnia, traveled to Knin to attempt negotiating a cease-fire but returned to this Croatian capital with little hope that either warring faction was prepared to back down.

In New York, the Security Council late Wednesday demanded an immediate halt to the Croatian offensive, declaring it was “in flagrant violation” of a two-day-old resolution. The statement read by council President Yoshio Hatano of Japan warned of unspecified further action.

But Boro Martinovic, a minister in the self-styled Krajina government in Knin, had earlier said: “We don’t have time for diplomatic games. The U.N. must react sharply to the Croatian aggression. They (the Croats) have 24 hours to return from where they came with all their weapons, to the last slingshot.”

Nambiar met a day earlier with Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, who has refused to comply with the Security Council order to withdraw from the Krajina unless the United Nations first disarms Serbian gunmen there.

Acknowledging that the Serbs and Croats have assumed irreconcilable positions, Boyd said the peacekeepers’ task is “as usual, to keep operating in that very narrow margin of hope that we can prevent the worst from happening.”

Fearful that the latest violence could explode into a broader Balkan war, France and Britain have moved aircraft carriers and other warships to the Adriatic to protect or evacuate their troops, if the Krajina battles flare out of control.

U.N. troops reported seeing Croatian fighters retreating from heavy artillery fire in Skabrnje, captured earlier in the offensive, suggesting that the Serbian counterattack was at least partly successful.

Belgrade media have reported 650 killed in the Krajina fighting, while Croatian sources put the death toll at 130. U.N. officials say they have no credible casualty reports.

The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said it was told by field workers in Knin that 10,000 Serbs had fled the Benkovac area because of the fighting. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was dispatching food, medicine and blankets to Knin, agency spokesman Peter Kessler said.

Benkovac and its surrounding villages were the scene of intense struggle in fall, 1991, when Croatian Serbs, rebelling against the republic’s secession from Yugoslavia, conquered the area, drove out non-Serbs and began repopulating it with Serbian families who had fled fighting in other areas.

“Many of these people had been displaced previously and had moved into this area to take over houses that had been emptied,” said Kessler, explaining that the two-time refugees were likely to be fleeing with little more than the clothes on their backs.

The Krajina fighting also prompted Serbian gunmen to seal off several roads, preventing the U.N. refugee agency from delivering food to the Bosnian city of Bihac, Kessler said. About 300,000 Muslim Slavs--many routed from other areas of the republic--live in the Bihac area, surrounded by Serbian-occupied territory.

Humanitarian relief to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo has also been sharply reduced because clashes and sabotage have closed all ground routes, Kessler said. An airlift of supplies is running at full capacity but can bring in only about half of what the besieged city needs.

Eighteen months of war in former Yugoslav republics has displaced more than 2 million people and left hundreds of thousands more dependent on Western aid.

A U.N.-brokered peace plan succeeded in freezing the war in Croatia last January after mediator Cyrus R. Vance promised that a deployment of U.N. “blue helmets” would eventually restore civilian rule to the huge area of Croatia seized by the Serbs.

But in frustration over the United Nations’ failure to disarm Serbian gunmen and help expelled Croats return to their homes, Croatian President Tudjman unilaterally abrogated the cease-fire and invaded the western extreme of the Serbian-occupied territory.

Although the heavily armed Krajina Serbs have quickly mobilized for a second round of war, their patrons in Belgrade have been unusually reticent in the face of the attack on fellow Serbs.

Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic said during a visit to Athens that federal Yugoslav troops will refrain from entering the Krajina fighting and leave it to U.N. peacekeepers to force a Croatian retreat.

Such restraint by the staunchly nationalist Belgrade leadership has given weight to widespread speculation that the Krajina offensive is part of a territorial trade-off agreed to by Cosic and Tudjman in closed meetings in Geneva, where Western mediators have been conducting peace talks on the war in neighboring Bosnia for nearly five months.

Such a trade may be under way, because Belgrade wants to retain the agriculturally rich Slavonia area of northeastern Croatia, which has also been conquered and occupied by Serbian gunmen.

The Krajina, which means “frontier” and takes its name from its days as a military buffer zone for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is an important transportation and communications crossroad for Croatia, linking the interior with resorts and ports on the Adriatic coast. Since Serbs seized Krajina in 1991, Croatia has virtually been severed in two.

Times special correspondent Laura Silber contributed to this report from Belgrade.