Hope Is in Air as Bosnians Emerge Into the Sunlight : Balkans: Mostar truce is latest step toward a normal life. But ethnic reconciliation remains a critical issue.

Bahrudin Hrvic cleared a path Tuesday through his friend’s second-story apartment, righting toppled chairs and picking broken picture frames and shelving from a tumble of drapes, lamps and sofa cushions thrown to the floor by 10 months of shelling.

It was the first day since last July that the 70-year-old Muslim had braved daylight in the ruins of East Mostar, where not a single building has escaped the punctures of tank shells and mortars, where not a window retains its glass, where not a family has been left untouched by death or injury.

The heavy-artillery bombardment by Croatian nationalists stopped only a few days ago, and the whine of an occasional sniper bullet can still be heard piercing the silence.

But Hrvic has more reason to trust this first hint of a lasting cease-fire than most of the 55,000 Muslims who have lived trapped in basements of blasted east bank apartment buildings while weathering the siege: His wife has been hidden by Croatian friends on the west side of this divided city since Hrvic was rousted from an afternoon nap by armed Croatian extremists and deported across the Neretva River wearing nothing but his underwear.

Now that the heavy artillery has been withdrawn from around Mostar, Hrvic has been helping those who gave him shelter and solace to put their homes in order.

He dreams of the day he can cross the river to rejoin his wife, rebuild his own home and summon his refugee children from Western Europe.

“Even after all that has happened, I’d rather live together with them than divided,” Hrvic says of the Croats and Serbs with whom he has shared his life.

While many of the Muslims who have suffered the brunt of loss and casualties remain skeptical that their ties with Roman Catholic Croats can be repaired, some, like Hrvic, are encouraged by the sudden outbreak of peace to believe they are nearing the end of a bloodletting that both sides now say should never have happened.

Throughout battered Bosnia, there is a new atmosphere of cautious hope and a willingness to believe in miracles as some semblance of a normal life is resumed amid the ruins.

In the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, trolleys ran Tuesday for the first time since the war began nearly two years ago. U.N. soldiers from Ukraine rode shotgun on two trial runs along Sarajevo’s main thoroughfare, known as “Sniper Alley” because of sharpshooters targeting pedestrians from the Serb-held southern side.

In another development heralding relief for hungry civilians, Swedish and Danish U.N. troops took control of Tuzla’s airport and began clearing mines and repairing the runway in preparation for its reopening later this month for a humanitarian airlift like the one that has long fed Sarajevo.

Some violent incidents disturbed a 4-week-old truce in Sarajevo, where three government soldiers were wounded by Serbian gunfire overnight and at least one rocket-propelled grenade detonated.

In Naples, Italy, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said a Spanish plane, part of an alliance task force enforcing a “no-fly” zone over Bosnia, had been hit by ground fire over Croatia.

NATO said the twin-engine Aviocar logistics aircraft--which was taking personnel from Zagreb, the Croatian capital, to Split--had to make an emergency landing at Rijeka airport on Croatia’s northern Adriatic coast. The Croatian government blamed rebel Serbs.

But the Mostar cease-fire, called by U.N. officials between Bosnian Croats and Muslims, has been respected beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

The end of shelling brought the pale residents of East Mostar out of their cellars and spurred the most optimistic to begin the long work of housing repair.

Hrvic helped his friends Enes and Djamila Muratovic comb through the rubble of their three-room apartment, which they had forsaken for life in the building’s cellar to escape the daily barrage of shells and rifle fire.

Since Hrvic was expelled by Croatian nationalists from the West Mostar home he had built and furnished with his life’s savings, he had been holing up with the Muratovices and as many as 70 other Muslims in the subterranean shelters that reek of excrement and unwashed bodies.

“I think we’re going to have peace here now,” said Muratovic, a 63-year-old retired soldier. “Look, I wouldn’t be here fixing this place up if I didn’t think so. We’ll have to wait for March 15 (when Bosnian-Croatian peace talks are to be concluded) to know for sure, but the heavy weaponry has been pulled back, and that means they can’t so easily kill us.”

There is not yet free movement between the Croat-held west bank and the devastated east to which Mostar Muslims were expelled last spring and summer.

But Hrvic says he is confident he will soon be able to return. He suspects his wife is waiting for him to come back to the west side and begin rebuilding their dynamited home, rather than planning to join him as a refugee in the east.

“The minute I can go back to the other side, I will. I’d swim the Neretva if I had to, to get there,” the elderly carpenter vowed with spirit, speaking of the swift, rock-strewn waters of the river that bisects Mostar.

While Hrvic and his emaciated friends from the cellar seem to assume Mostar’s integrated lifestyle will be restored, others who have suffered through first a Serbian siege and then betrayal by former Croatian allies warn that their scars will not so easily heal.

“There is no more life here. Everything is destroyed. I have no hope in anything anymore,” moaned Fahim Hadzajlic-Prolic, a 73-year-old refugee from nearby Capljina. “I’ve lost everything, including my wife, who died of a heart attack because of her suffering.”

As Amira Serdakovic tended the makeshift grave of her 13-year-old nephew in a small park strewn with broken brick from surrounding bomb-blasted buildings, she expressed profound doubt that Muslims and Croats will ever again trust each other.

“I know there are honest Croats. A Croat neighbor saved my life last year when we were being expelled,” said the 41-year-old, laying early spring daffodils on the mounded earth over her nephew, who was killed by a sniper last May. “But we aren’t ever going to forget what they did to us. We may find a way to overcome it, but we will never forget.”