Prospect of Peace Opens Door to Sarajevo Exodus : Bosnia: Some residents say they won’t leave. Others worry the capital could be taken by Serbs.

Inside a dank, three-room apartment they share with 10 other relatives, Aljo and Rasma Sepkic pass their idle days plotting an escape from this ruined city that has rediscovered peace but not its spirit.

Although the brutal artillery bombardment that afflicted Sarajevo for 22 months has ceased--for now--the Sepkics fear that there will be no chance to provide their two children with any semblance of a normal life for at least a decade.

Schools operate only sporadically. Running water and electricity still depend on the whim of armed Bosnian Serb rebels encircling Sarajevo. Snipers continue to menace pedestrians in the center of this city once renowned for its harmonious blend of cultures and religions.

What the Sepkics despair about most is their native city’s loss of hope for any rebuilding of a tolerant and multiethnic society and for a recovery of the prosperity it enjoyed before Bosnia-Herzegovina fell victim to nationalist terror.

He is a mathematician, she an economist, and they once knew all the suburban comforts enjoyed by their peers in Western Europe.

Today, however, there is no local work in either profession, and those employed in Sarajevo’s few operating offices and industries earn less than $2 per month in a city where the rudiments of survival are possibly more expensive than anywhere else in the world.

Foreign food aid provides most families with enough flour to prepare a daily ration of bread. But meat, sugar, coffee and most vegetables--smuggled in by thriving war profiteers--sell for more than $20 per pound. Gasoline, for the few who can afford it, has topped $60 per gallon.

“An honorable man will never again be able to make a living here,” says Sepkic, who has been appealing to friends, relatives and complete strangers in the West to give him the chance to perform even the most menial labor if Sarajevo’s barricades are lifted and he can get his family abroad.

Throughout the shattered Bosnian capital, dispirited people await the lifting of a Serb rebel blockade, as promised by officials of the U.N. Protection Force endeavoring to implement a step-by-step restoration of peace and order.

Some Sarajevans say they will never abandon their city, despite the deprivations inflicted by nearly two years of war. But concerns are mounting among both U.N. officials and politicians here that the first consequence of liberation might be a mass exodus of desperate civilians, leaving Sarajevo easy prey for the Bosnian Serb gunmen who want it as the capital of their own rogue state.

Bosnian government officials concede privately that they would prefer that the option of leaving Sarajevo be offered its war-weary residents only after the city has been at peace for a few months.

“No one yet believes the shelling has really stopped,” one Sarajevo official said. “If the barricades were lifted tomorrow, I think you’d see crowds of people rushing to leave.”

Thousands of Sarajevans seeking refugee status in foreign countries are already listed with religious and human rights organizations that have been negotiating with both the Muslim-led government and Bosnian Serb and Croat rebel leaders for limited evacuations of those in need of medical treatment or reunion with relatives abroad.

But for the vast majority of the 380,000 people left in the Bosnian capital, any departure, whether permanent or temporary, must await lifting of the rebel blockade.

The British commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, has promised to restore freedom of movement for Sarajevans who have been trapped in this city since rebel Serbs launched an artillery siege in the spring of 1992, after a majority of Bosnians voted to secede from the former Yugoslav federation.

Rose’s efforts to open civilian traffic corridors in and out of Sarajevo have been stymied, however, as Serbian gunmen have refused even to allow restoration of foot traffic over the midtown Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity that spans the Miljacka River and links the Serbian-occupied Grbavica neighborhood with the center of the capital.

For those yearning for a better life elsewhere, such as the Sepkic family, escape remains in the planning stage.

Forecasts of the size of the exodus that would follow genuine liberation of Sarajevo vary widely, and the most dramatic projections usually fail to take into account the difficulty most Bosnians would have in obtaining the right to visit or settle abroad.

Croatia, Slovenia and Austria all require Bosnian refugees to first secure visas, even if they plan only to travel through those countries while en route elsewhere. And permission to work or settle in the Western destinations most desired by those wanting to leave here--such as Germany, Switzerland and the United States--is even more difficult to obtain in this time of global recession and fierce competition for jobs.

Franz Bogen, Austria’s special envoy to Bosnia who lives in this shattered city about two weeks each month, predicts that there would be a massive outflow of Sarajevans if all barricades and travel restrictions were lifted.

But he firmly believes that most would soon come back.

“Everyone who leaves his country sooner or later wants to come back. That was our experience in Croatia and I’m sure it would be the same here,” said Bogen, whose makeshift embassy at the bomb-blasted Holiday Inn still has no visa-issuing authority because there is no way for Sarajevans to travel.

“Everyone here has been saying for 22 months that they want to get out. But we have to make it clear to people that they have to be patient, they have to live through this, that there will be a future,” the diplomat said.

In the interim of uncertainty, though, thousands are preparing to leave.

At the Interlingua private language school in the shattered Skenderija neighborhood, nearly 200 Sarajevans have plunked down the relative fortune of 100 German marks, about $65, to study English, German, French or Italian, most in hopes of finding work abroad.

“Before the war, people usually planned to come back” after taking their new language skills to Western Europe to find jobs in which they could earn hard currency, said Edin Hadzic, director of the 5-year-old school. “Now I think the majority wouldn’t want to come back.”

Hadzic himself said he cannot envision choosing life as a refugee over fighting to defend what is left of his native country and culture.

“If the situation improves, if there is no shooting for some months, if it is peaceful and Sarajevo is not divided, then I think there is a possibility we could all live together again and people would change their minds about leaving,” the 30-year-old school director said.

Because normal commerce and travel have been disrupted for two years now and there are few encouraging signs that the blockade will be eased any time soon, many have given up waiting for relief and, like the Sepkics, look outward for any chance to start over.

“There is no chance to rebuild this city. It is divided now. It’s dead. No one who was a true Sarajevan will want to stay here,” said 21-year-old Ariana Redzovic, who washes dishes at a cafe patronized by war profiteers to earn enough to buy the occasional potato or onion to supplement her charity flour rations. “I would go anywhere, absolutely anywhere, even to Albania, if I could just get out.”