A New Enemy Is Born, and He Lives Next Door : Ethnic strife: Fighting divides Croats and Muslims in Travnik, yet another microcosm of a horrific war.

It was about two months ago, residents figure, that decades of comfortable neighborliness, Muslim living next to Croat, started to unravel in Travnik, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Maybe it was the thousands of Muslim refugees who streamed into town in recent months from fighting farther east. And at least 12,000 arrived from the Krajina territory in Croatia after Serbs pushed them out. They moved into vacant apartments, took over the abandoned barracks of the former Yugoslav National Army, and then even camped in the parks when there was no more room for them.

Life in general got tougher. Electricity in the war-torn region was down to two hours a day over the past two months. People argued about Muslims joining the local councils that the Croats had taken over by force.

Now, a small town that used to be known for its forests and textile mills is better known for the blood spilled there among neighbors who turned into enemies. The fighting that broke out last week has divided Muslim and Croat forever. Travnik has become another horrible microcosm of the civil strife that is bleeding Bosnia dry.

Travnik’s story, told through the first of an estimated 9,000 refugees who began flooding into Croatia this week, is the story of many Bosnian towns, where warfare is not an accident, or a simple strategic necessity, but the product of politics gone badly astray.

“It all started a long time ago,” said Didak Ljubica, a 29-year-old shop assistant, “but everybody tried to hide it. We blame it on the politicians.”

Travnik had long been a mixture of Croats and Muslims--mostly Muslims, in fact. There were 16 mosques to two churches, one Catholic, one Orthodox. But in recent months Croatian residents started feeling resentful. And they say the Muslims started showing hostility.

“Our Muslim neighbors would pass through our village and say, ‘This is Turkey and will remain Turkey.’ I guess the hatred must have started sooner, but the open provocations only started in the last two months,” recalled Jovanka Bilavic, a Serb born in Croatia who fled with her Croat husband.

“For the last few months, I’ve only gone twice into town. I didn’t want to go out in the streets, because we would get provoked each time,” she said. “We would be called Chetnik”-- a term used derogatorily to designate Serbian nationalists--”or Ustashe”-- the name of the Croatian nationalists who sided with the Nazis in World War II.

Many other residents had similar stories.

“They would come to a coffee shop and say: ‘This is never going to be Bosnia-Herzegovina. This is going to be a jamahiriya (Islamic republic),” recalled one Croatian woman.

Added another: “They were pushing us. They would say, ‘We had a 500-year Ottoman Empire and we’re going to have it again.’ ”

Muslims tell a different story. The Croatian army throughout the southern, Croat-dominated Herzegovina region imposed control by military threat, they said, even in communities like Travnik where Muslims were in the majority.

Croats began to refer to all Muslims--even the refugees who were simply looking for a place to live--as moujahedeen , an Arabic word that means “Islamic freedom fighters.”

Once things started to go bad, the trouble escalated quickly.

Muslim soldiers in official Bosnian government uniforms began stopping cars and seizing them from Croat residents, some Croats reported.

Mirjana Krcevljak, a worker at the textile mill, said Muslim military men without families were invited by her Muslim neighbors to move into four empty apartments in her building. On Monday evening last week, she said, the men suddenly began searching other apartments in the building, looking for weapons.

“While this was happening, one of our neighbors was killed by a sniper shooting through a window, and when they saw that, they were frightened and they went away,” Krcevljak said. “But it wasn’t long after that that street fighting began.”

Her Muslim neighbors in the building began “arming themselves and preparing to fight,” she said. “They said they were afraid HVO (Bosnian Croat) soldiers might attack them, but there were no HVO soldiers in our building.”

On Thursday at 4 p.m., the Muslims started firing from their apartments, she said.

“They said they were going to slaughter Ustashe. “

Zeljko Duic, an HVO soldier, said Croatian forces were overwhelmed by the more numerous Muslim forces, most of whom seemed to have been based at nearby Zenica, but many of whom were local Muslim refugees who had put on uniforms and taken up arms.

“They attacked all the most important points held by the HVO. We tried to defend the city, but only until all the civilians were pulled out. We couldn’t do it any longer. There were 10 of them for every one of us, and as a soldier I must say this had to be prepared by someone who really knows a lot about strategy,” he said.

Some of the soldiers, he said, seemed to be Arabs, because they had long beards and spoke a language he couldn’t understand.

“When they would attack, they would say, ‘Allahu akbar!’ I was hearing this day and night. I was in a battle that lasted one night and two days.”

As Croat civilians and soldiers alike retreated toward the former enemy lines of the Serbs, perched on a mountain overlooking the city, Muslim forces moved into Travnik, burning down houses and, according to many of the refugees, killing some of those who had elected to stay behind.

And in the buses, trucks and private cars--some of them Mercedeses--that began chugging toward safety in Croatia, the bitterness went along.

“They couldn’t have been better friends than they were,” reflected Drajica Stojanovic, one of the thousands of Croatian refugees who began flooding into Croatia this week after unease turned to open warfare and the victorious Muslims claimed Travnik and its surrounding villages.

“It happened gradually during the war. It wasn’t all at once. All the time we tried to talk to them and we tried to keep relations normal. But you could tell something was changed. And now this,” she said.

“Two days ago, I went to collect some wood with my Muslim neighbor. Now, he’s there, and I have had to flee. I can tell you I hate him more than I hate the Serbs. Because we were sharing our village and this area together, and now it turned out to be something very bad. I prefer Serbs to Muslims, because a Serb, what he says in the morning, he will repeat again at noon.”

“We were hoping this wasn’t going to break up as it did,” said Ljubica, the shop assistant, shaking her head. “But on the other hand, we were afraid of it. We felt the tension that was created by political movements, by what the politicians said. We knew what would happen.”