Changing Lifestyles : Turning Guns to Plowshares : Muslims and Croats are moving out of the trenches and into the fields in Bosnia truce areas.

It has been two years since Ferid Smajlogic traded his business suits and briefcase for a camouflage uniform and a gun, and the notion of resuming his job as an export manager at a paper mill remains just a soldier’s fantasy about the good life that will come when war is over.

But as a truce takes hold among Bosnian Muslims and Croats who inhabit the stretches of the country that Serbian nationalists failed to conquer, the factory workers, farmers and others who were mobilized to defend their turf have begun to seriously contemplate a future as civilians.

Virtually every Bosnian male between 16 and 60 was drafted into the war effort after Bosnian Serbs rebelled against independence in March, 1992, leaving the civilian economy to founder and public services to crumble.

Since the Muslim-led government and Croatian rebels agreed in March to reconcile in the regions they control, a coordinated effort has been launched by U.N. troops, aid workers and war-weary citizens to move men out of the trenches and into the work of rebuilding a ravaged state.

Croatians like Smajlogic, home on furlough, pitch in with neighbors to repair water pumps, shell-shattered windows and tractors. Women and pensioners, helped by older children, are preparing ground for the first crops in two years. Relief workers are sweeping debris out of schools that became refugee centers and bomb shelters, restoring classrooms for the day when local authorities decide the artillery bombardment has stopped for good.

But military commanders, whose power and authority were inflated by responsibility for marshaling a defense, are resisting the transition that will once again relegate them to the periphery. And even fatigued fighters such as Smajlogic concede that their communities remain too vulnerable to immediately recall fighters from the front.

“We should be able to come back from the front as soon as possible and get back to work with civilian things, like getting water and electricity restored to our homes,” said Smajlogic, a Muslim. “We’re sick of war, but we need some guarantees that it is really over. It is not up to us whether it ends or not. You have to keep in mind that the Chetniks are right above us.”

Serbian nationalists, labeled Chetniks by their enemies in reference to the savage Serbian royalist forces that fought against Ottoman Turkish rule in centuries past, remain in possession of 70% of Bosnia.

In one sense, Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided by religions--the Eastern Orthodox Christian Serbs, the Roman Catholic Croats and the Muslim Slavs, who are a plurality in the country.

A new federation has been proclaimed by Muslims and Croats in what is left of the country that was home to all three groups for centuries before the former Yugoslav federation began splintering in 1991. But many remain wary of the prospects for a genuine and lasting peace while they are surrounded by Serbian gunmen who seem destined to keep most of the land they have seized.

The question that hangs over central Bosnia and stalls the desired return to civilian activity is whether the outgunned Muslims and Croats who make up the majority of this country’s population are willing to give up the goal of liberating Serb-occupied regions.

U.N. officers and Western mediators say they see the vanquished Muslim-led government as having little choice.

“The economy is completely out the window here. The deutsche mark is the only power, and the only vehicles you see on the roads are U.N. and (foreign) press,” said Maj. Mike James, spokesman for the British U.N. battalion in Vitez.

“This has been a military-controlled area because of the war. We’re just starting to see civilians taking over some services from the military, but those in the military don’t much like giving up that control,” James added. “Demilitarization is occurring, but so far only to a very small extent. Nothing is going to happen here overnight.”

It takes time to get beyond the fact that Muslims and Croats were battling each other over the past year. Armed checkpoints are still maintained by the ostensibly reconciled Muslims and Croats at the perimeter of each town, village or hamlet. But movement among the communities that were at odds during a year of Muslim-Croat fighting has intensified since heavy artillery was withdrawn from the area last month.

Highways that once carried heavy traffic from the suburbs to the cities are now filled with people making their way on foot to visit families and check on the homes they were driven from during the Croat-Muslim falling-out.

The most visible change from the past year, when people huddled in shelters as all three armed factions fought for territory, is the legion of people tilling the soil in preparation for spring planting.

Nusret Sahbaz, a 45-year-old union administrator for utility workers, used his first leave from army logistics work to hoe a patch of farmland for his family in a publicly owned field in Maglaj that had been fallow for years.

Despite his industriousness, Sahbaz said he remained skeptical that he and other furloughed fighters would be left to plant in peace.

“Until the aggressors are pushed back from Sarajevo and other cities they surround, there will be no hope that it is really settled,” Sahbaz worried aloud as he turned over the weed-choked earth.

Bosnian Muslims, who suffered hunger when Serbian and Croatian nationalists cinched off supply lines to starve them out, have made the planting of subsistence crops such as corn, beans and vegetables a priority.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has put together 400,000 “family packs” of seeds and gardening materials to allow the Muslims to plant their own food.

“There should be big spinoff benefits from this. It’s good for their mental health, because once the seeds are distributed, people are taking control of their own destiny and won’t be so reliant on foreign aid,” said Todd Cleaver, a New Zealander working with the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee in nearby Zenica.

IRC, the agency distributing the farming packets, has encountered numerous obstacles imposed by local government officials and war profiteers who have sought to control the flow of reconstruction aid to the population.

“One of the biggest growth industries here is going to be the mafia,” Cleaver predicted. “It happens after any war, when people want to get into positions of power.”

Despite the setbacks of occasional attacks by Serbian forces and resistance to restoring civilian control, signs abound throughout central Bosnia that war-weary residents are pushing their leaders to pay more attention to regaining normal life.

“Schools are already starting to reopen, and there is a lot of interest expressed by municipal authorities in having us bring in basic supplies, like books and pens,” said Steven Corliss of the U.N. refugee agency’s office in Zenica.

Many school buildings sustained major damage from shelling, and others are still being used to house refugees displaced from towns and villages now occupied by Serbs.

Everything from chalk to textbooks must be imported, as all Bosnian factories except those producing armaments were shut down over the past two years as workers were drafted into the defense effort.

Other projects aimed at jump-starting the stalled civilian economy include repairing hospitals and providing equipment and medicine for basic health care; reconnecting utilities and starting up factories to produce vital products and jobs, and building homes for upward of 1 million Bosnians who are unlikely ever to be permitted to return to homes in Serb-occupied land.

“We have to think about population shifts,” the IRC’s Cleaver said of the large number of Bosnians who will have to be permanently resettled once a negotiated division of the country is brokered and ethnic segregation is, in effect, given the West’s blessing.

Some refugees have already moved into homes and apartments abandoned by Serbs who feared reprisals after their nationalist brethren opened fire on central Bosnian communities.

“We took over a Chetnik apartment--they took ours, so why not?” said Zlata Basic, 39, who was driven by the Serbs from the village of Jablanica, a mile north.

She and her three children insist they will go home again if the Serbs lose. They reject any suggestion that they might be compelled by a negotiated compromise to forgo the lost territory and make a new life in their place of refuge.

But if the territorial status quo is little changed by toothless diplomacy, and life in exile for people like Zlata Basic drags on for years, some aid officials and Western mediators believe the refugees’ current places of shelter will eventually be considered their homes.

Others, however, fear that the nurtured dreams of all displaced Bosnians to return to their own land and homes will fuel considerable doubts that the war is over and that stability and prosperity can be rebuilt in Bosnia’s segregated and diminished territory.