Rebel Bosnia Serbs See Their Survival at Stake in Conflict : Balkans: Sanctions appear patently unfair to many. They see a threat of annihilation or Muslim rule.

It is the indignity, more than the inconvenience, of washing her baby’s diapers without laundry soap that has convinced Biljana Rudic that all the world must hate the Serbs.

The spacious hillside home she shares with her husband, sons and mother is full of modern conveniences, but her family must endure humiliating shortages caused by international sanctions imposed to punish those accused of fomenting war.

They’ve had no toothpaste for months, and there are no cold remedies for Marko, 3. For lack of gasoline, Rudic walked to the hospital in January to deliver her second son, Jovan. In each of her home’s three bathrooms, a bowl of torn-up letters and cash-register receipts provides embarrassing testimony that she cannot find or afford toilet paper.

With mounting hostility and incomprehension at what the world has done to the Serbs, Rudic watches her husband, Darko, shoulder his Kalashnikov each week and head off to serve three-day stints on the front line.

Her husband, a former ski-lift operator, helps guard artillery positions from which the rebels fire on Sarajevo, but Rudic says she feels no shame in his role in demolishing her native city. The way she sees it, he is protecting her and the children from a global conspiracy to annihilate her people or surrender them to Muslim rule, a prospect she has come to consider more frightful than death.

Sanctions and U.N. Security Council resolutions blaming Bosnian Serbs for this republic’s vicious war have left people like the Rudics stunned with disbelief that the international community could be so wrongheaded and reckless as to target Serbs.

Their sense of injury and injustice is so great, so consuming, that they have collectively concluded they have no choice but to fight on for national union and salvation. Even if their refusal to make peace with Muslims and Croats sparked a cataclysmic clash with Western forces, many seem to think the Serbs would prevail anyway.

“The more we are harassed, the harder we fight. We are not afraid of bombing,” says Darko Rudic, parroting the boasts of the Bosnian Serb rebel regime.

Inspired by powerful propaganda and a penchant among Serbian writers for epic tales of suffering and sacrifice, those lured into the battles to take territory for a Greater Serbia have come to believe this is the moment in history when Serbs will rectify centuries of repression, division and defeat.

The ethnic fighting ravaging Bosnia, from the perspective of Serbs like the Rudics, is not spurred by territorial hunger or political ambition on the part of nationalist Serbs. They see the war as the culmination of a heroic struggle for their very survival.

Even hints of flagging support from Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic have failed to deter the Bosnian Serb campaign for an independent and ethnically pure state in which they could feel securely isolated from the surrounding array of historic enemies.

Despite threats of punitive air strikes, the Bosnian Serbs showed their contempt for foreign mediation by rejecting a Western-proposed peace settlement with a stunning 96% vote against it last month.

Fighters like Rudic feel that to capitulate to demands from the West that Bosnia’s Serbian minority submit to multiethnic rule would be a betrayal of the quest for freedom and unity for which generations of Serbs have martyred themselves.

For many in the Serb-held regions of Bosnia, the past 15 months of vicious battles among Serbs, Muslims and Croats are a phase in the natural progression of struggles that Serbs have engaged in since Ottoman Turks crushed their independence in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

Serbs suffered persecution during the subsequent 500 years of Turkish rule, and power-hungry opportunists have successfully exploited history to reignite old animosities and direct them at Bosnia’s secular Muslims.

Rudic, 33, concedes that he grew up feeling equal and at ease with Muslim Slav friends, unaware of any reason the ethnic groups should live apart. But now, he says, echoing the revisionism crafted by propagandists, he realizes that Bosnia’s largest community was all along engaged in a plot to create a fundamentalist state that would restore Muslim domination over the Serbs.

“Anywhere you went you saw that the Muslims had all the privileges,” Rudic insists, pointing to the predominance of Turkish-built mosques over Serbian Orthodox churches as evidence that the Muslims had more religious freedom.

He also now considers in retrospect that he was a victim of discrimination because Muslims and Croats, who use the Latin alphabet but speak the same language, could not always read what he wrote in Cyrillic letters.

The strength of the Serbs’ sense of victimhood is most obvious in the selective memories and contradictory impressions of Serbs caught in the middle, like Biljana Rudic’s mother, Milka Vidovic.

She lived for 45 years in thoroughly integrated Sarajevo and weathered the Serbian siege of the capital for the first seven months. She finally escaped the unrelenting bombardment by bluffing her way onto a Red Cross bus and escaping through the front lines to join her daughter here.

Vidovic claims not to know how the siege of Sarajevo started but recalls that Bosnia’s predominantly Muslim government forces defended her high-rise apartment building until Serbian artillery set it ablaze in October, leaving her homeless and with only the clothes on her back.

Since resettling with the Rudics in Pale, Vidovic has become convinced that her losses were the result of a Muslim power grab, which forced her fellow Serbs to take up arms for their own protection.

But after a lifetime in the bastion of tolerance and integration that until a year ago was Sarajevo, Vidovic finds it more difficult to redefine her identity than does her son-in-law, whose family extends back at least five generations in the Serbian stronghold of Pale.

“I always considered myself a Yugoslav, and I had friends from all communities. I’m angry that this war has forced me to become a Serb nationalist,” says the 51-year-old Vidovic, whose other daughter, Gorana, is married to a Muslim.

Vidovic takes the side of the Rudics when they insist that there is no future for Bosnia except through ethnic partitioning. But she has no answer for how Gorana’s family, now living as refugees in the Czech Republic, should be resettled in Bosnia if it is carved up along ethnic lines.

“I just don’t know,” she responds in tones of weary frustration. “Am I supposed to hate my own grandchildren?”

For older Serbs, the conflict in Bosnia is a settling of accounts with World War II-era Croats who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs under the Nazi puppet Ustasha regime. Today’s Croats were earlier aligned with the Bosnian government in the battle against Serbian efforts to force ethnic division; that, seen through the Serbian nationalist prism, seems to justify taking revenge on the Muslims.

To explain why Serbs must rule over the territory they have seized and “ethnically cleansed,” pensioner Danko Ostojic removes from his wallet a snapshot of his mother’s grave.

“They killed my mother and grandparents in the 1940s, and now they are killing again,” he says, likening the atrocities of half a century ago to the deaths of Serbian rebels now manning the siege lines.

Anna Maksimovic, an administrative clerk in the nationalist bastion of Han Pijesak, wears black clothing to mourn her brother, a 42-year-old fighter she says was “slaughtered by Muslims.”

“He was just defending his children and fighting for our national survival,” says the grief-stricken woman, who later explains that her brother died from a bullet wound in the rebel drive to take Zepa, a Muslim village 15 miles from Han Pijesak.

While such casualties might seem to outsiders to be the predictable human toll in a territorial offensive, each death in the war that has festered into a savage cycle of attack and retaliation induces genuine grief that provides fresh confirmation that Serbs are victims.

Bosnian Serb television, produced in Pale in the image of state-run and fiercely propagandistic Belgrade television, provides a nightly display of mutilated corpses and wailing mothers to reinforce the collective view that it is Muslim fundamentalists who are killing innocent Serbs.

Belgrade media long ago laid the groundwork for the Serbian national mind-set, which holds that Germany, the Vatican and the world of Islam have been conspiring to repress Serbs. They contend that Catholics bankrolled the 1991 war in Croatia, that fundamentalist nations are seeking a European foothold by enhancing Muslim power in Bosnia and that Germany is directing the regional bloodshed in a fiendish plot to acquire Adriatic Sea ports.

Slavisa Rakovic, the savvy media manager for Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, looks genuinely perplexed when his claim of German expansionism is challenged as 19th-Century geopolitical thinking.

“What is the difference between the 19th Century and today?” he asks rhetorically. “Only the methods have changed, not their intentions. Germany has been very successful in getting small countries like Czechoslovakia and Hungary on its side without conflict. They have the best piece of cake in Europe, and still they want more.”

Serbs are unfairly accused of fomenting the crisis, Rakovic says, exuding his nation’s feeling of martyrdom by noting that Serbs throughout history have been cruelly misjudged.

“In 1914, Serbs were also seen as barbarians, but by the end of World War I, you all came around,” he reminds Americans. “This is the third time in recent history that Serbs are the victims of a German plot, and it is only a matter of time before the West comes to a proper understanding of the conflict.”

In the meantime, fighters like Rudic are busy defending the vanquished territory they have taken in the Serbian quest for national union.

“I don’t think anyone will bomb us because they would not be able to kill us all, and as long as there is one Serb left living, we will fight for our rights,” says the wiry young fighter as his wife and mother-in-law sadly nod in agreement. “If I am killed, my wife will have to raise my sons to take my place.”

* LOCAL ECHO: A man is accused of threatening Councilman-elect Rudy Svorinich Jr. over Balkan conflict. B4