Ethnic Discord : Sarajevans See Cease-Fire as Calm Before Storm : Bosnian residents, more cynical and dispirited than ever, fear rebels are using truce to regroup and rearm.

The Bosnian soldier, wearing camouflage fatigues and sporting a gold earring, stood in the frigid, darkened lobby of a shelled building and plotted his escape.

“I am fed up, fed up,” said the man, who at 21 is already a veteran of war. He would marry his young girlfriend, and together they would somehow leave the city he had fought to defend for the past three years but where fewer and fewer people can find hope for the future.

In some ways, conditions in this besieged and forlorn capital are better than they have been for months: The shelling that killed civilians and shredded homes has stopped, with a few exceptions; prices of black market food, often all that’s available, have come down; some homes now have electricity.

But Sarajevans are perhaps more cynical and dispirited than ever this winter.

The current four-month cease-fire, brokered by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and signed on New Year’s Eve, is seen by many as a calm before the storm.

“I am really afraid of this peace,” said Safija Boric, 47, who worked in a sock factory back when factories were still open. “I would love it if the war could stop, but I am not sure. I cannot be sure. So many times they have betrayed us.”

Ever since Serbian nationalist gunmen surrounded and cut off Sarajevo nearly three years ago in ethnic warfare aimed at driving Muslims and Croats from the capital, its people have persevered. With remarkable survival skills they have dodged sniper bullets, swept up glass shattered by bombings and swallowed their pride to accept food donations from the rest of Europe and the United States.

Last year, many still had hope that the longest siege in modern history would be brought to an end, that somehow the international community would end a war that has killed more than 250,000 people.

Then Bosnian Serb rebels launched attacks on two of Bosnia’s so-called “safe areas”--Gorazde in April and Bihac in November, the latter in response to attempts by the government’s Muslim-dominated forces to break out of the so-called Bihac pocket and expand their control beyond the U.N.-protected area. The Serbian tactics at Bihac were rough. When the commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces called in airstrikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization against the Serbs’ heavy artillery, the Serbs simply kidnaped hundreds of U.N. troops, using them as human shields that effectively neutralized the might of the outside world. And despite the current cease-fire, government forces at Bihac are still under attack.

The Serbian forces have become more intransigent, diplomats say.

No sooner had hopes been raised, ever so slightly, in January than the five-nation Contact Group, which for six months had been trying to persuade the Bosnian Serbs to accept a plan for dividing up Bosnian territory, left the region in disgust. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, after giving envoys from the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Germany hints that he might be receptive to the plan, instead flatly rejected it , according to diplomats. Now, they say, the prospects for additional negotiations are dim.

So the skepticism among Sarajevans who might have seen a ray of encouragement in the New Year’s cease-fire has deepened. The winter is a time of rearming and regrouping, they fear.

“In the springtime, there will be new fighting,” said Nijaz Durakovic, 45, an opposition politician who serves in Bosnia’s Muslim-led government.

“There is a lot of apathy,” Durakovic said. “This is lasting too long. Even the strongest ones are at the end of their strength. People would go on if they saw an end in sight, but we cannot see it. We feel betrayed, even by those we thought were our friends. Maybe our biggest mistake was that, from the start, we thought that the mighty United States would help us.”

Fuad Gadzo, a mechanical engineer and soldier in the Bosnian army, is like many who stuck it out and now regret it. There is a growing resentment among people like Gadzo that their patriotism has been futile. Those who left at the beginning almost three years ago got jobs in Italy or Austria. Now those countries are weary of taking in the displaced Bosnians and no longer welcome them.

“It is not a question of whether I am angry or not,” Gadzo said. “Maybe those who left early were more clever. We did not actually expect this would last so long.”

Gadzo, 34 and single, lives with his parents and other relatives and reports to guard duty on the front-line trenches around Sarajevo every third day. Even before the war, he joined an ad hoc militia called the Patriotic League, defending his home against what Bosnian Muslims were already convinced would be attacks from their enemies. But today, Gadzo wonders whether he can find work--perhaps in New Zealand, where he has friends.

“I am tired of trenches and bunkers,” he said. “I would like to work at my job. I know more about being a mechanical engineer than about being a soldier. If I could do my job here, I would stay. But it depends on how it will be here in the future.”

Ganiba Adilovic works in a bank. She still has a job because the bank, like most since the war, is dedicated primarily to handling the remittances that relatives living outside the former Yugoslav federation send to their families in Sarajevo: money for basic survival.

Adilovic, a mother of two, marvels sadly at how her world has changed so dramatically, from a multicultural life where Serbs and Muslims were neighbors to a battlefield where she cannot even cross into some suburbs that are now under Serbian control.

“Nobody knows how long this will last,” she said in her once-comfortable apartment, her family huddled in the single room they can manage to heat with a gas stove. “Negotiations will last five or 10 years, and sooner or later they have to agree on something or life will be terrible for everyone. They cannot shoot each other for another 100 years.”

Greta Weinfeld-Ferusic survived the Auschwitz death camp during World War II and went on to work as an architect. But after three years of the siege, the 70-year-old woman says she feels empty, of “diminished intelligence” and barely alive.

“I have no fantasy anymore,” she said. “I don’t see it ending. I mostly don’t know how this could have happened in Yugoslavia, where we all lived together. Nobody thought of such a cruel kind of war.”

Mirza Mujadzic is a doctor at Kesovo Hospital. For three years, he has followed the political and diplomatic machinations that seemed to control his life and his future. But now it all seems distant and useless.

“There is not a very bright future, and nobody cares,” Mujadzic said. “Before, people were trying to find ways to avoid war, looking for formulas. But not anymore. We are on a straw in a river, and we are floating. Our destiny will be the destiny of that straw. It does not depend on us.”