Regional Outlook : Buried Balkan Tension Rumbling to Surface : Outside world’s actions are too little, too late to keep the ethnic conflict in Bosnia from spreading, observers fear.

American and Scandinavian troops peer out across the scruffy landscape along this most unstable European fault line, armed with little more than hope in their mission to prevent a southward spread of the Balkan conflict.

The international community’s latest approach to the seething and intractable Balkan war focuses on symbolic deterrence and a face-saving policy of containment.

Fear of a Vietnam-style quagmire has dissuaded Washington and its European allies from militarily challenging Serb and Croat gunmen wreaking havoc in Bosnia-Herzegovina and repressing their ethnic minorities.

Instead, the European Community and the United Nations have attempted to politically wall off the worst battlegrounds and hope that the nationalists who are killing, raping and plundering their way to victory will be sated by their Bosnian conquest.

But from the rekindling Serbian-Croatian conflict in the disputed Krajina region to an incubating clash between Greeks and Albanians, the Balkans are a boiling caldron of unresolved territorial disputes and political intrigues that are more likely to be fueled than contained by the outside world’s inaction.

Rather than deterring a spread of the conflict from its current Bosnian venue, new U.N. troops deployed to guard designated safe areas in Bosnia and potential flash points like this one on the Serbian-Macedonian border are more likely to become spectators to an ever-widening Balkan war.

International mediators overseeing negotiations in Geneva have been pressuring the Bosnian government to give in to a plan that would partition the republic among its three primary ethnic groups, which the predominantly Muslim government considers a prelude to the erasure of Bosnia from the map of Europe.

The United States and its NATO allies convened in Brussels Monday to again consider the possibility of intervening militarily around Sarajevo, but none of the measures under consideration are likely to restore Bosnia to its prewar structure or bring peace to the shattered republic.

Even if the international community has decided to write off Bosnia--a move Sarajevo officials condemn as unconscionable--containment of that disaster would have no significant effect on the root cause of the Balkan turmoil.

“Like the origin of the conflict, its solution is in Belgrade. If you want stability, you have to get rid of (Serbian President Slobodan) Milosevic and change the nature of the regime in Belgrade,” said George Kenney, the former State Department official who oversaw Yugoslavia until he quit in protest of the West’s Balkan policy last August.

Carving up Bosnia as a means of providing Milosevic with another chunk of territory for the Greater Serbia he is building will only encourage extremists elsewhere in the Balkans to use the reviled tactics the Serbs have found successful, Kenney said, predicting that “ethnic cleansing” will be the wave of the future.

“If the aggressive nationalists in Bosnia get their way, other aggressive nationalists will want to emulate them, and you’ve got radical Albanians, radical Macedonians, radical Greeks and so on. They all want territorial expansion, and there is no way to accommodate all of them, so some of them are going to resort to throwing around bombs. I’d say there is about a 100% chance of the conflict spreading if we just wash our hands of Bosnia,” warned the former diplomat who now works as an analyst at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

His view that the region is poised for another escalation in the killing and massive uprooting is widely shared among Balkan experts familiar with the numerous pressures building up independently of the Bosnian crisis.

“The barbarians have won. The world has to accept the fact that its failure to intervene when it was possible to do so at a much lower level of violence has had the predictable results,” said Bogdan Denic, a City University of New York professor of political sociology and one of the few Serbs who still spends his summers on Croatia’s Adriatic Sea coast.

“In reaction to fears of a Vietnam syndrome, we have decided on an Attila the Hun approach to foreign policy. We don’t intervene unless we can massively destroy the target and achieve a clear, short-term victory,” said Denic, a naturalized U.S. citizen. “The problem is that none of those conditions are meetable in Yugoslavia, yet the conflict and the dangers of it spreading persist.”

He accuses European Community mediator Lord Owen and his former U.N. counterpart, Cyrus R. Vance, of ceding the moral high ground to the armed Serbian and Croatian nationalist forces in Bosnia by capitulating to their pursuit of ethnic borders.

“If the international community wants to change borders and respect the use of force, then this war will go on and on,” warned Vesna Pesic, a prominent Serbian opposition figure.

She believes the message being transmitted by the West’s retreat from the Bosnian crisis is that extremists have nothing to fear in the way of foreign intervention, no matter how heinous their tactics, as long as the ensuing atrocities do not affect Western strategic interests.

Indeed, with no serious threat of deterrence, the forces of violence and destabilization have gained ground throughout the Balkans, offering a frightening array of possible venues for the next nationalist battleground.

Foremost among them is the long-simmering conflict in the Serbian province of Kosovo, where 60,000 Serbian police, soldiers and paramilitary gang members impose what amounts to martial law over nearly 2 million ethnic Albanians.

Until last week the West had one tripwire in place in the event that ethnic clashes in Kosovo, Vojvodina or the predominantly Muslim Sandjak region of Serbia were to suddenly flare out of control. But in an action many fear is symptomatic of Belgrade’s attitude toward Western efforts at containment, the Serbian leadership expelled international monitoring teams that had been deployed to the three Serbian flash points by the 52-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

CSCE’s Swedish chairwoman, Margaretha af Ugglas, condemned the Serbian action as “deeply regrettable.” Loss of the monitors, she warned, “aggravates the threat to peace and security in the region.”

Other CSCE diplomats put the implications more bluntly.

“This shows the Serbs are feeling very powerful now, that they can just thumb their noses at the international community, as they have done with impunity on every other issue,” said one official of the alliance devoted to protection of human rights and regional security. “CSCE was the only international presence in the region that offered any kind of early warning system for the southward spread everyone is concerned about.”

Kosovo could easily explode into uncontrolled bloodletting because of the high concentration of troops and weapons in the province--whether sparked by Serb nationalists bent on thwarting the region’s proclaimed autonomy or by an uprising among the repressed Albanian majority, which is 90% of the population.

In addition to the tensions brewing in Kosovo, Serb nationalist forces have been harassing Muslim Slavs in the Sandjak region and the 500,000-strong Hungarian minority in Vojvodina in moves many observers interpret as a prelude to more “ethnic cleansing.”

Those left in the clutches of the armed nationalists without even the skeleton monitoring crews to act as witness see the expulsion of the monitors as a sign that the conflict is about to spread.

“People fear that once the war is over in Bosnia, that it will start here,” said Shaqir Shaqiri, a leader of Kosovo’s Albanian community.

Like many political analysts in the region, Shaqiri sees the Bosnian war as just one of several consequences of the Serbian nationalist drive for territory, not its ultimate objective.

Should the conflict spread to Kosovo, a chain reaction of defensive actions is expected among the region’s scattered Albanians, drawing those in Macedonia, Montenegro and the independent state of Albania to their Kosovo brothers’ side.

Any border-crossing incursions--which the U.N. peacekeepers by mandate are powerless to stop--could be expected to invite retaliation by Serbia. Such developments could quickly lead to regionwide war, especially if they involve Macedonia, where Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Albania can all lay some ethnic or territorial claim.

A Western diplomat based in the Macedonian capital of Skopje accuses Greece of stirring up such hysterical domestic opposition to an independent Macedonia that the Greek population “cannot be counted on to act in its own interests and stay out of this no-win conflict.”

Aside from the potential for further ethnic violence involving Serbia, there has lately been an explosive buildup of social and economic pressures in that isolated and internationally condemned republic. Two years of waging war elsewhere in the Balkans, and the devastating U.N. sanctions imposed because of that aggression, have so shattered the country’s economy and social order as to threaten an outbreak of Serb-against-Serb violence.

Hyper-inflation fueled by government money-printing to pay salaries, buy up grain crops and produce more weapons has soared exponentially, making the Yugoslav dinar a meaningless measure of value and pushing prices for the most basic goods beyond the average worker’s reach.

Belgrade officials last week introduced a 50-million dinar note, the largest in circulation, worth about $3 at issue and being decimated each day by inflation.

How long the 10 million people of Serbia and Montenegro--the last two republics left in the former Yugoslav federation--will endure the current hardships without open revolt is a riddle about which few Balkan observers hazard a guess.

“Riots are inevitable in Serbia, and I expect the unrest to be much larger and wilder than it was in Bucharest (Romania, 1989) with many more victims,” predicted Mihajlo Markovic, a leader of the largest Serbian opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement.

Many fear that Milosevic, as a last resort to stay in power, might trigger fighting in Kosovo or reignite war with Croatia as a means of rallying the nation.

Croatia is ripe for renewed conflict because it also suffers economic turmoil and the loss of nearly one-third of its territory, now under Serb rebel control.

Zvonimir Baletic, head of Zagreb’s economics institute and a former Cabinet member under Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, said that the government is spending half its budget on defense.

Western defense analysts contend that Croatia’s military spending is evidence that an offensive is planned to recover the territory seized by Serbian forces during a six-month war in 1991.

“The Croatian government says it has no intention of making an attack on the RSK,” Cedric Thornberry, deputy chief of the massive U.N. peacekeeping force in the Balkans, said of the occupied Croatian territory the rebels refer to as the Republic of Serbian Krajina. “But we have seen evidence on both sides of a (military) buildup. They are not saber-rattling, but rocket-rattling.”

He attributes Croatian impatience to the snail’s pace at which U.N.-mediated negotiations have proceeded since 14,000 “blue helmets” were deployed to the occupied areas 16 months ago, ostensibly with the aim of restoring the territory to civilian control and helping hundreds of thousands of Croatian refugees return to their homes.

Farther south in the roiling Balkans, an ethnic division independent of the Yugoslav turmoil has recently opened between Greece and Albania.

After the government in Tirana expelled a Greek Orthodox clergyman for allegedly stirring up secessionist sentiments among the Greek minority in southern Albania, Greece last month began rounding up and deporting tens of thousands of Albanians who have been working illegally in northern Greece.

The move is portrayed by Athens as a justified application of immigration and labor laws. But the brutality with which diplomats and other independent observers say the deportations have been conducted, as well as the Greek government’s apparent interest in reclaiming the southern Albanian region it calls Northern Epirus, have produced another spark in the Balkan tinder box.

Albania and Turkey more than a year ago entered into a joint defense compact, posing the possibility of Turkish support for impoverished Albania in the event the tensions with Greece or with Serbs over Kosovo escalate into open combat.

Either of those potential clashes would send shudders through Western Europe, as they would probably pit NATO members Greece and Turkey against each other, cutting through the West’s chief military alliance.

The growing potential for a spread of the Balkan bloodshed has prompted some European neighbors to demand that the international community take more effective measures aimed at prevention.

“There is an obvious potential for the war activities to spread beyond the territory where they are taking place today,” Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky warned in a recent discussion with foreign journalists. “I can only hope this potential won’t be realized, but the risks are so obvious that the international community is obliged to try something else.”

Austria and Hungary, neither of which is a member of Western defense alliances, have lobbied for more determined measures on the part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the United Nations to challenge the march of Serbian nationalism that threatens to spread beyond the former Yugoslav federation.

“The cost of stopping the war does not go away simply because the international community wants it to,” said an Austrian Foreign Ministry official. “The cost only goes up with time, like any bill that is not paid.”

Fault Lines

Territorial disputes and political intrigues fracture the Balkan landscape, threatening to erupt into an international war.

* BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

Serbian rebels continue to bombard the capital and other U.N.-designated safe areas in eastern Bosnia. Croatian nationalists in central and southern Bosnia have broken with their former Muslim allies and seek to conquer as much territory as possible from the region not under Serbian control, provoking retaliation by the Muslim-led government forces.

* SERBIA

Martial law has been imposed on the province of Kosovo, which is 90% ethnic Albanian. At least 100 Albanians have been killed in sporadic clashes with Serbs, but calls for restraint by ethnic Albanian leaders have kept the situation from exploding. Albanians in Albania and Macedonia have vowed to defend their Kosovo brothers if the latter are attacked, which would probably draw in Greece, Bulgaria and possibly Turkey, where Serbian troops terrorize the Hungarian minority.

* MONTENEGRO

At least one-fourth of Montenegro’s 550,000 residents are ethnic Albanians and would probably be drawn into any conflict in Kosovo. There is also the possibility of a split from Serbia.

* CROATIA

Krajina, a ribbon of Serb-occupied territory, runs from the border with Serbia, around the northwestern horn of Bosnia and south nearly to the Adriatic Sea. The Serbian rebels in the eastern region are allied with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, while the faction that considers Knin its capital fears Milosevic is willing to trade off their territory in exchange for permanent control over the eastern areas. The Knin Serbs are heavily armed and await what is widely believed to be an imminent offensive by the Croatian government to retake this territory.

* MACEDONIA

Slavic Macedonians, who account for about two thirds of the republic’s 2 million people, fear provocations by Serbia to seize this republic nationalists consider Southern Serbia. Ethnic Albanians in Macedonia expect to be drawn into any fighting in Kosovo, which would invite retaliation by the Serbs against the whole republic.

* ALBANIA

Cross-border fighting with Serbs can be expected if conflict breaks out in Kosovo and Macedonia. To the south, ethnic Greek villages are being encouraged by Greek nationalists to agitate for secession and reunion with Greece.

* BULGARIA

Bulgarian nationalists consider Macedonians to be Bulgarians, as their languages are very similar and they have the same Slavic roots, so any Serb-Macedonian fighting could draw in Bulgaria. In the south, latent hostility inspired by the former Communist government’s attempt to assimilate the 1-million-strong Turkish minority continues to cause sporadic conflict with rural Slavs.

* GREECE

Athens has whipped up a fierce campaign against Macedonian independence because it insists use of that name implies territorial aspirations on the northern Greek province of the same name.

* TURKEY

Turkey has entered into a joint military compact with Albania and might be counted on by the Tirana government to come to its aid in the event any fighting in Kosovo spreads to Albania.