A Haven for the Wronged and Resentful : Bosnia: The town of Tuzla, clogged with desperate refugees, provides a window on the misery and unrest that many fear lie ahead for the region if war continues.

Even in the best of times, when Yugoslavia was united and tranquil, the Tuzla Valley was an uninviting expanse of polluting factories and dispiriting high-rises slowly sinking into an abandoned salt mine below.

But this grimy industrial region’s redeeming value was its tradition of tolerance and its people’s appreciation of multicultural life. A microcosm of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s melting pot, Tuzla was a place where Muslims, Serbs and Croats intermarried and prospered.

Now, swollen with Muslim refugees expelled from the poorest, most backward villages of eastern Bosnia, the island of government-held territory extending south from Tuzla is fast losing even its spiritual charm and becoming a depleted, depressing and hostile Muslim redoubt.

Like the Serb-occupied land to the east and the southwestern regions where most Bosnian Croats live, this largest, most self-sufficient remainder of free Bosnia has been faded and frayed by “ethnic cleansing.”

The Tuzla pocket, about all that is left of Bosnia after Serbian and Croatian land seizures, provides a window on the misery and unrest that many fear will be the future of the Balkans if the death and displacement of war are allowed to continue. With 200,000 Muslims uprooted from eastern Bosnia crowded in among 600,000 natives, Tuzla’s renowned generosity has been exhausted and its commitment to unity with Serbs has worn thin.

“These refugees who have suffered from the Serbian side cannot even look at Serbs now, and they don’t understand how we can either,” said Alija Mojkanovic, a Muslim boutique owner married to a Croat and living in what used to be a predominantly Serbian section of town.

Among the city’s 180,000 residents are nearly 20,000 Serbs, who relief officials say have begun to feel uncomfortable among the large numbers of angry victims of acts committed by Serbian rebels laying waste to Bosnia’s east.

As social tensions have risen with the tide of refugees from Srebrenica, several hundred Tuzla Serbs have taken up an offer from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees over the past three weeks to be escorted across the front lines to Serb-occupied territory. Thousands of others are now believed to want to follow.

“You can control a lot of things, but you cannot control soldiers who are losing the war,” said the U.N. aid agency’s Anders Levinsen, who believes Tuzla Serbs are being threatened not by their longtime neighbors but by defeated Muslim soldiers arriving from vanquished areas.

The steady eastward flight of urban Serbs and the continued influx of expelled Muslim peasants have accelerated the segregation of Bosnia and reduced this city to an impoverished haven of the wronged and resentful.

In addition to the disruptions caused by the Serbian offensive in the east, Croatian nationalists to the west of Tuzla have erected barricades on key roads through areas where they are challenging Muslims for local control. That has cut off supplies of food, fuel and raw materials to Tuzla and the government-held territory extending to the Serbian siege line around the capital, Sarajevo.

The disruptions have idled Tuzla’s chief industries, like the massive petrochemical complex that has long tainted the region with the smell of sulfur and clouds of smoke.

While the remnants of Bosnia suffer economic sabotage by nationalist rivals, military officials loyal to the Sarajevo government insist that the region is too populous and well defended to be vulnerable to the kind of siege the Serbs have used to take over 70% of Bosnia during the past year.

Ekrem Avdic, spokesman for the Bosnian army’s Tuzla-based 2nd Corps, concedes that most of this region is within range of Serbian artillery. But he contends that the rebels are already overextended trying to defend their captured territory and that any effort to open a new front with the Tuzla forces would be doomed to fail.

The region has never had a Serbian majority, Avdic points out, adding that half of the troops fighting to preserve Bosnia are based in the Tuzla pocket and that more than two-thirds of its armaments are deployed here to deter any further Serbian advance.

However, Western diplomats in Belgrade are less confident about Tuzla’s security, noting that the chemicals, cement, wood, metals and other vital commodities the city once produced would be crucial in reviving economic activity in the Serb-held zones.

Despite the disruptions and the demographic shifts inflicted by ethnic cleansing, local leaders insist it is not too late to rescue both the economy and the multiethnic character of the region.

Tuzla Mayor Selim Beslagic believes vital industries could be restarted in a month if not for the roadblocks. He has appealed to the Croatian government in Zagreb to repair broken trade ties hurting both sides. He has also asked Western aid agencies for seeds and fertilizer to expand spring planting and wean the Tuzla pocket from its dependence on aid.

Local leaders consider economic resuscitation their only chance for fending off a worsening of the social climate driving Serbs away and prompting the destitute to resort to crime. But their success will also depend greatly on the fate of the Serbian offensive in the east.

About 60,000 Muslims, many of them homeless refugees from other areas of eastern Bosnia, are trapped in the town of Srebrenica. Jose Maria Mendiluce, the U.N. aid agency’s special envoy here, worries that a collapse of Srebrenica could deal a final blow to the Tuzla region, a surprisingly functional remnant of the Bosnian state.

“They are very well organized and very honest here, but everything is going to collapse if they continue to be under a blockade,” Mendiluce warned. “They are prepared (to handle new refugees), but for how long and for how many is in question. If it continues, all of them are going to become destitute and dependent on international assistance.”

Some feel the leveling has already occurred. “The citizens are now just as poor as the refugees,” said Zehra Dropic, an architect who directs the city’s massive effort to resettle the displaced.

Most Tuzla residents have been patient and sympathetic toward those expelled by the Serbs, but many complain that the crowds of idle villagers have altered the character of this highly developed city and put a staggering load on its meager resources.

“Our Serb friends with whom we ate and drank are gone, and they have been replaced by these rural people we don’t know,” said Mojkanovic, the boutique owner. “Let’s be honest: They are less sophisticated, and Tuzla isn’t what it was. It is somehow brought down to a lower level.”

He expresses great sympathy toward the victims but echoes the concerns of others that Tuzla is on the verge of a breakdown. Food supplies have been further disrupted by a recent escalation of fighting on both sides of the pocket, and the city’s age-old settling problem--caused by exploitation of an underground salt mine decades ago--is crushing sewer and water pipes, raising the threat of an epidemic.

The blockades must end to allow repair goods in, and the war must stop to prevent further crowding and social strains, Mayor Beslagic said. But with neither condition likely to be met in the foreseeable future, many here expect a gradual unraveling of the social order.

“There is tension here now. Too much has had to be paid by Tuzla because other areas of Bosnia are enslaved,” said Nermina Durmic-Kahrovic, a reporter with the local television station who, with her husband, brings home about $3 a month. “But the people who came here have nothing. We have to help them because this could just as easily have happened to us.”