Tense Croatians See Specter of War Lurking Behind U.N. Expulsion : Balkans: President insists 12,000 peacekeepers must be gone by July. That’s left many people nearly paralyzed with fear.

Dragica Hodak pointed through the laundry hanging on the barren balcony of a three-room apartment that she and her family occupy as refugees.

“They are very close,” she said of the enemy, speaking carefully so her 4-year-old son would not detect the alarm in her voice. “You can almost see the shelling from this window.”

The specter of Croatia returning to war haunts towns like this and people like Hodak. After nearly four years of relative peace, the government of this wishbone-shaped country leaning against the Adriatic Sea appears closer than ever to resuming an ancient conflict over land and identity.

Croatia has announced that it is expelling the 12,000 U.N. peacekeepers who have been the buffer between Croatian forces and their foes, the Serbs, who control nearly a third of national territory.

The Serbian insurgents took the land in the 1991 Serb-Croat war after Croatia declared its independence from what was then the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation. An estimated 10,000 people were killed, and tens of thousands, like Hodak, were driven from their homes.

The way the Croats see it, the U.N. mission was to help oversee return of the land to Croatian control. But that has not happened, the Serbs have effectively set up their own state within a state, and the Croatian government has lost patience. Time’s up.

In a high-stakes gamble that alarmed the international community but played to domestic nationalism, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman said the United Nations must be gone by the end of June. Although Tudjman insists that he wants “peaceful re-integration” of the disputed areas, his move was widely seen as Croatia clearing the way to retake the land by force.

If war erupts again, Karlovac, 35 miles south of the capital, Zagreb, will once again be on the front line. It was heavily bombed during the battles of 1991, when the Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav army, easily overpowered the lesser-armed Croats.

Still barely a mile from Serbian forces, Karlovac continued to suffer during the “peace,” when the Serbs periodically shelled this and other targets to remind the Croats they were still a threat. Eight residents were killed in a Serbian attack in the fall of 1993. A downtown church lies in ruins, numerous buildings are pockmarked and the city is surrounded by refugee camps.

The Croatian government and the Serbs signed a cease-fire agreement in March, 1994, and things have been relatively quiet since. Many of the Croatian Serbs, meanwhile, have crossed westward into Bosnia-Herzegovina, where they have been attacking the Muslim enclave of Bihac.

For Hodak and others in Karlovac, the relative quiet is now studded with tension and dread.

“Of course we are afraid of more war!” said Hodak, almost derisive of the question as she sat at her small kitchen table, her toddler son, Hrvoje, clinging to her neck.

“People are living without aim, living from day to day,” she said. “Everyone is afraid and very uncertain. They do not know what to expect. I have to pretend in front of my children so they will not panic. But we are all afraid.”

Hodak, 34, was forced to flee from her home at Lake Plitvica, a popular tourist site in central Croatia, in early 1991 when Serbs surrounded her town and launched a scheme of “ethnic cleansing” to drive out non-Serbs. She was nine months pregnant at the time.

Leaving behind her husband, a policeman, she was bused to one refugee center after another, miles and miles from home, before ending up in Karlovac. She gave birth to Hrvoje in a refugee camp.

“He started his life as a refugee,” Hodak said of her child. “No one knows how it will end.”

Hodak’s husband, Mile, was eventually allowed to leave Plitvica and joined her in Karlovac, where they were given an apartment that, ironically, had been abandoned by Serbs who either fled or were driven out of this Croat-controlled area. Mile Hodak, 37, a darkly somber, largely silent man, said he is convinced that “peaceful re-integration” of Serb-held territory is impossible.

“I am not afraid,” he said. “My only feeling is pity and sadness because of the children and for the younger generation, because they will have to pass through war and atrocities.”

The mistrust is, of course, mutual. The Serbs believe they are entitled to self-rule in their ancestral homes along the long, rural stretch of Croatia known as the Krajina, which borders on Bosnia. Their forebears were first settled there as a barrier against advancing Turks hundreds of years ago, and the reputation they earned as dedicated fighters continues today.

The Serbs, recalling the massacre of their people by Croats who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, do not want to be ruled by today’s Croats. With the U.N. pullout seemingly imminent, the Serbs are convinced that the Croatian army is preparing to attack them, and they are ready to fight back. In perhaps a final blow, the Serbs in January rejected a political plan that would have given them partial political autonomy in the Krajina.

In deciding to expel the United Nations, Tudjman capitalized on widespread anger among many Croats who fault the international peacekeepers for their failure to restore the seized land. And he is relying on his wholly unproven belief that the Croatian army, which has spent the last three years rearming and expanding, will be able to make short work of the Serbs.

Although popular at home, the move immediately cost Croatia in the world community. The United States suspended plans to hold joint military training operations, sources say, and millions of dollars in loans from international lending agencies are now in jeopardy.

Tudjman has made similar threats to oust the United Nations and then reconsidered. But diplomats say he is holding fast this time, and he has received near-unanimous backing from the Croatian Parliament.

“The Parliament rejects all pressures on Croatia aimed at changing its decision,” legislators said in a statement.

U.N. officials warn that their disappearance will lead to a rapid deterioration in the former Yugoslav federation and to broader warfare.

“It would be like living in a town of wooden houses without a fire brigade,” U.N. spokesman Michael Williams said.

Expelling the United Nations from Croatia also has far-reaching and ominous implications for Bosnia, U.N. officials say. In addition to the U.N. troops assigned to monitoring the Serb-Croat dispute, headquarters for the entire U.N. Balkans mission and most logistics support for the Bosnian operation are based in Croatia.

Diplomats say that Tudjman, the first president of Croatia since it became an independent country, is seeking to secure his place in history and wants to go down on record as the father of modern, unified Croatia. And the world focus on Bosnia, virtually ignoring Croatia, has angered him, analysts say.

Tudjman has said he believes he can avoid wider war by securing diplomatic recognition from Slobodan Milosevic, the powerful president of Yugoslavia whose vision of a Greater Serbia was the original inspiration for the Krajina Serbs to rebel against Croatian rule.

But Milosevic, mastermind of the ethnic warfare that has reduced the former Yugoslav federation to a hodgepodge of killing fields, has to weigh loyalty to his Serbian brethren against his desire to gain international acceptance and have sanctions that the world placed against the rump Yugoslavia lifted by keeping out of new wars. Milosevic has so far refused to recognize Croatia unless sanctions are lifted first.

“Tudjman is gambling on the fact that Belgrade (the Serbian capital) wants an end to the sanctions and wants the international community off of its back,” a European diplomat said. “But if Milosevic fails to come to the aid of his fellow Serbs, he could have domestic problems. He could be pushed from power. He has his own delicate balancing act.”

Even if Milosevic formally stays out of a renewed Croat-Serb war, Bosnian Serbs--through their leader, Radovan Karadzic--have vowed to fight alongside Croatian Serbs.

And so while the world ponders such geopolitical equations of war and peace, the people of Karlovac simply wait.

“The government does not care about Karlovac. We are alone and too far away,” said Mira Valic, a round-faced woman of 54 who remembers with horror the bombings four years ago. Her son-in-law was badly wounded, a small restaurant she owns was destroyed, and she eventually had to flee to Germany.

Valic and her 65-year-old husband have repaired some of the damage to their property, but they have not bothered to reopen the cafe. Although they have resumed much of their day-to-day life, they remain on edge. Valic feels especially betrayed by Serbs who one day were her neighbors and the next were shelling the neighborhood.

“I was not ready for war in 1991, but now I am even less ready,” she said, sipping coffee in the cold darkness of her unopened cafe. “I have lost my nerves, my inner peace.”

Outside Valic’s home, across a street where snow lay melting in craters left by Serbian bombs, a graffito in the Serbs’ Cyrillic alphabet was scrawled: “Heroes.”

Gordan Dupin strolled casually nearby, reading a newspaper as he passed a knot of elderly refugees. Unmarried and with no children, the 29-year-old said he had been called up for military service three times in the last two years. Each time, the Croatian army stationed him on the front line.

Even his job at a tool factory does not restore any normalcy to life, Dupin said, adding that he hopes to leave for Zagreb.

“Look around for yourself,” he said. “This city is dead. It is not just the buildings and the streets that are ruined. Life is ruined. There is nothing here, just refugees, and people do not know what is going to happen.”