Weary Croats Expect Renewal of Warfare : Balkans: Refugees from Bosnia have streamed through Slavonski Brod. Its residents see conflicts with Serbs as their future.

In the streets of this riverfront town, amid bullet-pocked apartment blocks and the odd shell crater, the boys and girls of refugees and residents play at war. No child, naturally, wants to be a Serb.

In the children’s ward of the hospital, Bozana, 3, with cropped blond hair and big brown eyes, mutely accepts a stuffed toy from a Western visitor. A year in a Serbian concentration camp transformed her father into a raving psychotic.

Now, Bozana says nothing as she fondles her toy. The little girl in a blue pajama top suffers from insomnia and muscular seizures similar to epilepsy, doctors say. She can sit by herself for hours and say nothing.

Marijan Vincetic, a farmer born in 1956, is another casualty of war. He was mutilated three weeks ago when a 150-millimeter howitzer shell fired from Serb-held territory hit less than 15 feet away as he waited in a crowd to take a river ferry from Bosnia to Croatia.

Shrapnel severed the nerves to one leg and so shredded the muscles of the other that doctors say the lanky man with two sons will never walk again.

But Vincetic, an ethnic Croat from Bosnia, wants to go home. “My life is there, my children are there,” he says. At his bedside, wife Jela says that she and Marijan intend “to continue our destiny” by returning to the 15-acre spread where they raised wheat, corn, tobacco and dairy cows.

Months ago, fearing an invasion of Serbian fighters, the Croats demolished the bridge on concrete pylons that connected them to the other side of the Sava River. There, in the dying republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, ethnic Croats, Serbs and Muslims lived side by side. Now the Serbs control the opposite bank.

Death and suffering, privations and uncertainty cannot be so easily cut as a bridge. They continue to be the lot of this city’s 57,000 people. An uneasy peace reigns between Croatia and Serbia. But the people of Slavonski Brod fear that once the future of Bosnia is settled, full-scale battles are fated to erupt again across the Sava on Croatian soil, between Croat and Serb.

The city many Croats know simply as Brod was the last northern exit for refugees, in this case chiefly ethnic Croats, fleeing the civil war that has driven 2 million Bosnians from their homes and left up to 200,000 dead or missing.

Shelling from Serb-held land across the Sava has killed 48 children here and wounded dozens of others so seriously they will be invalids. Between 6,000 and 7,000 have been moved to safer towns.

The heavy artillery fire ceased last November but flares up now and again. One night last week, the crackle of gunfire rolled across the river. Seven of the city’s eight kindergartens have been damaged by artillery, with one hit 15 minutes after children were hurried into the bomb shelter.

For eight months, patients were jammed into the ill-lit basement of the city’s hospital, which treated 7,500 war-wounded. More than seven tons of blood were poured into the bodies of the injured.

One surgeon, Ivo Pajic, performed 1,000 operations single-handedly. Before each, he says, “I thought, ‘This could be my son.’ ”

About a quarter of a million demoralized Bosnian refugees streamed through Slavonski Brod in the last year, with most continuing onward to other parts of Croatia or to Germany, Austria and other countries. There are 17,000 refugees registered here now, including 5,200 children.

“In the beginning, maybe they had fewer problems than now because they hoped the war wouldn’t last long and they could return to their homes,” says Ivan Balen, director of the city’s medical center. “But now they are more and more unhappy every day because they don’t know what is going to become of them.”

The Croats are not the only ones to have suffered. The road that winds southward by cornfields and rose gardens to this city in eastern Croatia runs past villages full of once-handsome brick cottages, many of which are now in ruins or have had their red tile roofs blown off. Those villages, a mostly Serbian pocket in the ethnic crazy quilt that covered the former Yugoslav republic, are virtually deserted.

Serbian children had been enrolled in Slavonski Brod’s kindergartens but were chased away long ago, hounded by classmates as “Chetniks” and “bad people.” In charge of kindergarten curriculum, Manda Pavelic is trying to entice the remaining children into after-school activities such as theater to stop them from playing soldier in the Croatian army.

“We try to teach the children that not all people from a nation are bad, but it’s very difficult to tell them good things about the Serbs since they have all had experiences with being shelled and having people they knew or loved wounded,” Pavelic says.

“The children will carry these awful memories forever,” she says.

The war has devastated the economy of this town that, by the customary road, is only about 120 miles from Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. It takes at least five hours to reach now because territory seized by Croatia’s Serbs must be avoided.

There are 11,500 unemployed, and 40% of the townspeople are classified as “social cases,” or in need of some form of assistance. A few refugees work illegally in newly created workshops that turn out baskets or wicker furniture.

The city hospital, the region’s biggest, was well supplied while Serbian and Croatian troops were fighting each other, because it was situated between two fronts. Then, it received 200,000 German marks (more than $340,000) in donations each month. It now gets only about a quarter of that.

For want of funds, salaries are very low: 250 German marks ($430) monthly for a doctor. The illegal basket weavers can earn more.

Vaccines for children are critically short, and hospitalized patients are fed only two vegetables--potatoes and cabbage.

Despite the on-again, off-again movement toward negotiated peace in Bosnia, the people of Slavonski Brod seem resigned to a renewal of war. Serbs and Croats are de facto allies in fighting Bosnia’s weak Muslim-led government. But it was not long ago that Croats and Serbs were trying to kill each other on Croatian soil.

In a hilltop cemetery at Pleternica on the outskirts of town, Dario Busljeta, 9, frolics among the graves and plastic wreaths marked “a last farewell.” The boy wears a bullet on a string around his neck. When he grows up, he says, he wants to be a soldier.