Muslims Have a New Motto: Do Unto Serbs as They Have Done Unto Us : Balkans: Nearly vanquished and feeling betrayed by the West, Bosnians taste revenge. And it is bitter.

None of the three men in a smoky, odorous recovery room of Kosevo Hospital will ever walk again, let alone pick up a rifle to settle the score for his lost limbs. But the fighters wounded in Bosnia’s lopsided war exude a hostile energy that infects visiting comrades who are forced to ponder how easily death or maiming could be their own fate.

As Bosnians come to grips with the dispiriting reality that they have been left to their own inadequate devices to repulse Serbian aggression, the overriding emotion among the defenders of this nearly vanquished country is a galvanizing anger that many fear will lead to more bloodshed.

After visiting fellow soldiers mangled by a Serbian mortar, Adison Nezirovic headed back for the thickly wooded flanks of Mt. Trebevic, armed with a newfound bitterness and driven by a thirst for revenge.

“I’ve lost my best friends on that mountain, and I don’t care if I have to die too. But I hope I kill at least 10 of them before I die,” said the lanky, bespectacled 25-year-old who claims he never had an aggressive impulse in his prewar life as a mechanical-engineering student.

Nezirovic, his injured buddies and increasing numbers of civilians and government officials say resentment over the outside world’s refusal to help Bosnia defend itself is radicalizing people who have lost faith in playing by democratic rules. From the foxholes of Trebevic to the halls of the presidency, Bosnians are vowing to defy Western cease-fires and take the offensive to win back control of their country.

“Morale has improved, because now we realize it is up to us,” said Nino Karahmet, 34, a taxi-driver-turned-soldier who lost his left foot in a fierce battle instigated by Bosnian government forces. “We waited too long for America to help us, and now we have to make up that time.”

Officers at the 1st Corps headquarters, in a sand-bagged building that used to be a bank, confirm privately that they no longer feel restrained by Western-mediated agreements that the international community declined to impose on the attacking Serbs.

In recent days the government forces have succeeded in severing a crucial Serbian supply line near the capital, and a pervasive sense of anger and disappointment over Washington’s retreat from threats of intervention is believed to have encouraged a deadly attack by Muslim troops on Croatian civilians in the city of Travnik.

Western Europe and the United States had threatened air strikes against Bosnian Serb artillery and lifting of a U.N. arms embargo handcuffing the Bosnian government forces in the event the rebel Serbs refused to go along with a U.N.-mediated peace plan.

But when the rebels voted down the proposal that would have required them to withdraw from nearly half of the territory they have conquered, Washington and its European allies dropped the intervention warnings and scaled back to a policy of containment.

The change in Western strategy effectively cements the status quo in Bosnia, where Serbian rebels control 70% of the country and Croats have much of the rest. Muslims and those Serbs and Croats who oppose segregation are crammed into Sarajevo and five other enclaves that have been heavily damaged by 14 months of warfare and remain surrounded by Serbian nationalist forces.

Many here, and in the other enclaves destined to become U.N. safe areas, say they feel rebuffed by the world’s democracies.

“We have been sold out,” said Fuad Abadzic, a battalion commander of the 1st Mountain Brigade that has pushed back Serbian rebel forces nearly half a mile in recent days. “We counted on the world to help us, so we respected the agreements they drafted. But now we have nothing to hope for. We have to take matters into our own hands.”

The feelings of betrayal and abandonment have raised concern among both Bosnian officials and foreign diplomats that the people of Bosnia could turn to terrorism to focus attention on their plight.

“We are not kamikazes. We used to live in the most civilized way,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Sulejman Suljic. “But if we go on living in ‘protected zones,’ where the only right guaranteed to us is to be fed and turned into terrorists . . . it will soon be time for the international community to take this situation seriously. We do not want to become world terrorists struggling for human rights.”

Some note that a trend toward aggressiveness is already discernible in recent outbreaks of inter-communal violence that for the first time are clearly attributable to vengeful Muslims.

“In some areas of Bosnia, people are becoming increasingly radical,” warned Srdjan Dizdarevic, Bosnia’s Olympic Committee chairman and a leading figure in the opposition Liberal Party.

Like Sarajevo, the multiethnic city of Tuzla was largely spared inter-communal fighting because Serbs, Croats and Muslims had long been thoroughly integrated and were unwilling to submit to the nationalist rebels’ demands for ethnic division.

But as more than 200,000 Muslim refugees from the most backward areas of Bosnia have flooded into Tuzla, their presence has ratcheted up the ethnic tension level and undermined the commitment to unity of the urban Serbs.

Despite the U.N. embargo and efforts by both Serbian and Croatian extremists to deprive the government forces of defensive arms, Bosnian officers say they are able to get some guns and ammunition by bribing indifferent reservists manning enemy checkpoints or U.N. troops from poor countries.

The prohibition against weapons sales to any of the six former Yugoslav republics was imposed two years ago in the hopes of avoiding escalation of the armed clashes that had not yet spread to Bosnia.

But the embargo has, in fact, affected only the landlocked and besieged Bosnian government forces, because the rebel Serbs are supplied by neighboring Serbia’s thriving arms industry and the Bosnian Croats are aided by Zagreb.

The official posture of the Bosnian government has vacillated in the wake of the Washington proposal between self-pity and angry threats to cease all cooperation with the West.

President Alija Izetbegovic and other top figures in the predominantly Muslim leadership have taken to insisting that peacekeepers pack their bags and leave Bosnia, apparently assuming the United Nations would then lift its arms embargo.

The international community’s refusal to lift the embargo, more than its unwillingness to punish Serbian aggression, is at the root of the bitterness consuming Bosnians who are convinced they could defeat the rebels if they were not so hopelessly outgunned.

“They aren’t good soldiers because they are fighting for someone else’s power,” Dragan Brbovic, 38, a fighter with the 1st Mountain Brigade, said of the Serbs dug in only a few hundred yards from near the Bosnian defense line.

Revealing the bitterness and determination with which Bosnian fighters are now taking the offensive, Nezirovic claimed the Washington proposal for safe areas instead of military help is doomed by a critical oversight. “We didn’t agree to die quietly,” he said, predicting more warfare. “We never agreed to be sacrificed.”