COLUMN ONE : War Casts Shadow on U.S. Serbs : Reports of atrocities, though met with skepticism, have brought isolation and anger. Many fear becoming ‘black sheep of the world.’

The demons that pursue Danny Djurkovic come in a constant and numbing barrage.

Each day, he watches the stream of news reports: Serbs raping Muslim women. Serbs herding skeletal prisoners into concentration camps. Serbs maiming innocent victims in a random artillery attack.

“I am going through hell,” said the 63-year-old Studio City man who survived one war in the Balkans and now finds himself entwined in another frighteningly similar conflict.

Djurkovic is a Serbian-American.

While the war has claimed many souls in the Balkans, here, half a world away, it has swept an entire community of Serbs into its embrace, a community that has found itself branded as the world’s latest incarnation of evil.

Like Croats and Bosnian Muslims who are also watching the war from afar, America’s Serbian community has felt the pain of having relatives uprooted from their homes, acquaintances killed and their homeland torn by war.

But what has struck deepest and set them apart from the others is a growing perception of the Serbs as genocidal combatants.

The scope and brutality of the reported incidents--stories of Serb-run concentration camps, “ethnic cleansing” and the widespread rape of Muslim women--have forged an image of violence that has hit at the heart of a people struggling to reconcile their own sense of identity with a frightening new image of evil and barbarity.

A strange communal depression has reached across the distance and generations to those who thought they were far removed from the conflict.

“It’s like post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Father Ilija Balach, a Vietnam veteran and pastor of St. Petar of Cetinje Serbian Orthodox Church in Sylmar. “People can’t sleep. They’re worried about their families, they’re worried about their children, how they’re going to be treated at school. We’re really at odds trying to figure out how to deal with it.”

Djurkovic, a retired manager of a medical laboratory who has lived in the United States for 37 years, said the war has cast his entire life and being into the shadows.

There are days, he said, when he is depressed and unable to rouse himself to leave his home. At other times, he struggles to contain a blistering anger against the media and the U.S. government, dismissing the claims of atrocities as propaganda: the Muslims are bombing themselves and blaming it on the Serbs, the photos of Serbian prisoner camps are really Croatian camps holding Serbs.

“Lies, all lies,” he said. “I know my people and they are not capable of these atrocities.”

Sleep is hard to come by these days, he said. On some days, he has found himself walking in the woods, remembering the horrors of World War II, in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs were killed by the Germans or Croatian fascists.

In one of his darker moments a few months ago, Djurkovic said he loaded his pockets with coins and drove to Tijuana to give money to beggars. “It was just to forget my troubles,” he said. “It was the truth of the situation, the innocence, the real human beings.”

The image as the pariahs of the world has been especially disturbing for Serbs in America--many of whom came after fighting the Nazis or later fleeing the communists. As with other groups in the Balkans, they have long seen themselves as stubborn freedom fighters and the victims of foreign power struggles.

“The world sees Serbs as killers, rapists, fascists,” Djurkovic said. “They say we are everything that we are not.”

The Serbs number about 30,000 in Southern California and boast of their assimilation into American society. They are spread throughout the region, although there are many in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

If there is any center to the community, it is St. Steven’s Serbian Orthodox Cathedral in Alhambra, the largest Serbian church in the region.

Djurkovic, a burly man who came to the United States in 1956, is part of the generation of Slavs who lived through World War II. Their feelings have, in many ways, shaped the hatreds and suspicions of the current conflict.

He recalls seeing the Sava River filled with bloated bodies of executed Serbs.

Those memories of war had become distant, removed from his new life in America. Now, they gnaw at him--a symbol, in his view, of how blind and forgetful the world has become of the Serbs’ cause.

He has become obsessed, he concedes, consumed at times by a rage he has never felt before.

“Do I like how I’ve become?” he said. “Not really.”

The resonance of the current conflict for the people of the Balkans is, in part, a product of the complex relationship between ethnic groups and the long, tangled history of the region.

The Croats, Muslims and Serbs are actually racially identical people who settled in the Balkans after invading the area in the 6th Century.

The Croats settled in the north of what became Yugoslavia, the Serbs in the south. The division between the two groups eventually led to the Croats’ greater orientation toward western Europe and the Serbs’ to the eastern Byzantine Empire. The Croats became Catholics, while the Serbs became part of eastern, or Orthodox, Christianity.

The Bosnian Muslims are descendants of the Serbs and Croats who converted to Islam during the nearly 500-year Turkish occupation of the Balkans, which ended only in the 19th Century.

Suspicions between groups in the region have existed for centuries, a product of numerous wars, vacillating political alliances, cultural differences and foreign influences.

But the full flowering of conflict came only in the modern age, after the gradual weakening of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century and the accompanying growth of nationalism among Slavs--previously just minor players in the shadows of the great powers.

The nationalistic fears driving the current war are virtually the same as they were in the 19th Century. Croats, Muslims and other Slavs have long feared a “Greater Serbia,” a unified Serbian state that could dominate the region because of numerical and geographic superiority. The Serbs fear the domination of other groups, which have aligned in the past with outside powers, such as the Nazis and the Ottomans, to squelch Serbian dreams of independence.

In the current war, the battlegrounds are a series of disputed lands, often ethnically mixed, within the boundaries of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, both of which have separated themselves from Yugoslavia and become independent states.

The Serbs claim they are defending lands where they have lived for centuries, while their opponents claim the same.

Balach, who has seen his small congregation in Sylmar torn apart by the conflict, said the war is not nearly as clear-cut as the world seems to believe.

He too feels frustrated and powerless at times seeing his people cast in the villain’s role. Over the months, he has watched his parishioners fall further into isolation.

“All of a sudden we are the black sheep of the world,” he said. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to give them moral support now. And that is a devastating thing.”

The anger he sometimes sees in his congregation is not necessarily directed at Croats or Muslims, but rather toward the media. He too has felt hatred and has struggled to contain it. “It’s impossible to be human and not feel that,” he said.

Much of the turmoil springs from the conflicting emotions unleashed by the war, he said. People are revolted at the atrocities, but have a difficult time believing that many were committed by their own people. They yearn for peace, but are moved by the nationalistic slogans of the war. They see themselves as Americans, but feel outraged as Serbs by the United States’ condemnation of Serb attacks.

“You’re really split in so many ways,” Balach said. “It’s just eating people up inside.”

Mike Katic, a 37-year-old Torrance photographer who came to this country when he was 12, said he never thought a war raging in a land he barely remembers could have affected him so much.

He grew up in New York and moved to Los Angeles after serving in Vietnam. He married a Vietnamese woman and never thought much of keeping in touch with other Serbs in Los Angeles. He thought of himself as just an American, living a typical life in the suburbs.

But Katic, like others, said the reports about Serb aggression have made him feel driven into a corner.

With every new attack, he has become more strident and more withdrawn from his wife and children. He seeks out Serbian friends now for solace and talk about the latest news of the war.

“I never realized how deep my roots were until this came about,” he said. “I never dreamed this would happen to me.”

Amid the furor, the hardest course has been to remain neutral.

Radmilla Jovicic, a 34-year-old West Hills opera student, was born in this country and never really understood the historic hatreds in her parents’ country. She always thought the difference between Croats and Serbs was like that between Californians and New Yorkers. She never heard of Bosnian Muslims until she met her husband, who was born in Bosnia.

After watching the reports of rapes and random bombings, she said she sometimes feels an almost instinctive urge to support the Croats and Muslims. At the same time, everything in her upbringing, all memories of family and community, makes her rebel at the thought that her people are to blame.

“I’ve always been a person on the side of the underdog. I’ve always tried to fight for what’s right,” she said.

The problem, she said, is that she has no idea anymore who is the underdog and who is right. “I don’t watch Belgrade TV because I don’t believe it. I don’t believe CNN, I don’t believe the papers,” she said. “Really, I don’t know what to believe.”

As an American-born Serb, Jovicic said she naturally made friends with other Slavs and since the war she has tried to protect their friendships.

She will not talk about the war and steadfastly refuses to take a side. But the cost of neutrality is that now, even with close friends, talk is strained and distant.

“I’m going to try to stay in the middle as long as I can,” she said. “I try not to let myself go crazy, but it’s a hard thing to do.”

But for many Serbs, neutrality is ultimately a losing battle.

Jovicic’s husband, Vesko, grew up in Yugoslavia when ethnic conflicts were largely suppressed by the communists.

There are differences between Muslims, Croats and Serbs, but no more so than Latinos, Asians and Anglos in this country, he said.

“It’s so weird,” he said. “Do you know that the people we went to school with, the people we went out with, are now killing each other?”

Jovicic said that he has tried to avoid joining one side or the other. But gradually, he has felt himself drawn into the battle.

The complexity of the conflict is reflected in Jovicic’s evolving sense of self-identity.

He remembered that he used to call himself a Yugoslav, but after the country began to unravel two years ago, he called himself a Bosnian because he was born in Bosnia. But as the fighting intensified, he found no one would accept that name anymore. He became a Serb.

Unlike other friends, he maintained there was no right side in this war, they were all wrong to fight each other.

Then, eight months ago, he found out that a cousin in Bosnia had been killed by Muslims. “I guess I found myself on a side,” he said.

Now, there isn’t a month that goes by that he doesn’t hear of another friend or relative killed in the fighting.

He has asked his mother to stop telling him the bad news. He has stopped reading the newspaper. He has refused to allow his son to be exposed to anything related to the war.

“I don’t want to be on any side,” he said. “But what can I do? I can only believe what my friends and relatives tell me, the people I have known for 36 years. It’s the only thing I can do.”