Croats Express Jubilation, Anxiety After Recapturing Land Lost in ’91 : Balkans: Zagreb’s better-organized army wins first major victory over Serbs. But civilians’ nerves are frayed.

Mike Ivancic, a Croat who has lived most of his adult life in New York City, stood with his Croatian army unit on the front line of what was, until Tuesday, Serb-held territory. He relished victory.

“I love this land, and we are willing to die fighting for it,” he proclaimed as Croatian forces took control of the town that served as headquarters for Serbs who seized this portion of Croatia in their 1991 war of secession.

Declaring its mission accomplished, Croatia on Tuesday said its two-day blitz into the region of Western Slavonia was over. It was this country’s first major victory over the Serbs. The Croats had successfully recaptured land and sent their enemies--those, at least, who survived the fight--fleeing southward toward Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The bedraggled town of Okucani, just off the mist-shrouded highway that connects Zagreb and Belgrade, was the prize.

Getting there told the story of a war that seemed swift, deadly and still in flux.

The shells of an armored personnel carrier and of a couple of other trucks and cars lay tossed to one side of a highway littered with debris and tank-churned mud.

The Serb checkpoint, about seven miles from Okucani, which signaled the entry into Serb-held territory, was in shambles. Above it, a Croatian flag had been draped from an overpass.

Villages a few miles to the south, near the border with Bosnia-Herzegovina, were burning, the flames and black smoke visible on the horizon above green and yellow fields of flowers. Tanks rolled past rain-soaked refugees who crowded into prefabricated shelters clustered around a U.N. post.

The soldiers reaching Okucani, Ivancic among them, were jubilant.

“Four years ago, they took the land from us,” said Ivancic, a large man dressed in camouflage fatigues who regularly leaves his builders’ contracting business in New York to help Croatian causes. “We didn’t have guns so we had to run. Now we have some guns, and we have to fight.”

The Serbs, of course, also claim ancestral title to this land. But that was not an argument for the moment.

One thing seemed clear--the Croatian army that showed itself this week is better organized, better trained and better equipped than the more motley version challenged by the Serbs in 1991.

The Croatian government controlled journalists’ access into Okucani, restricting them to travel with police escorts. Although the Croatians entered Okucani around noon, they did not allow reporters in for five more hours.

Croatian television made a point Tuesday night of broadcasting to a nervous nation pictures of this area--of government officials opening a police post in the newly recovered town, of the 30 or so civilians who remained saying, carefully, that they were being treated well.

The images, however, could not hide the destruction of smashed kiosks, shattered shop windows and streets littered with crumpled cars and bicycles.

While bravado set the mood in Okucani, fear and frayed nerves were more evident at the government-controlled town of Novska, about 12 miles west of Okucani, where shelling continued and residents stacked sandbags for protection.

As two reporters drove into town at midafternoon, shells landed in the center, hitting a gasoline station and a bus. Inside the bus, the bloodied driver lay dead.

Stjepan Rubenic peered out from the window of his home, a few yards from the bus, and simply shook his head.

“We cannot leave here, and even if we could leave here, where would we go?” asked Rubenic, who gave his age as “more than 80.” “The shooting is everywhere. Look, even in Zagreb. I could go from here, but what for?”

Nevenka Bacic, a mother of two, furiously shoveled reddish dirt into plastic bags, which her neighbors placed outside the windows of their three-story apartment.

“I am not afraid, just in a hurry,” she snapped. “We have to keep ourselves safe.”

She and the other 21 people who live in the building moved into the basement on Monday when the fighting started, and they were not yet prepared to budge.

Another of the neighbors, red-haired Maria Petraj, 58, had to flee in the 1991 conflict to a refugee camp, where she lived five to a room, with no place to wash.

“It is difficult to stand that,” she said.

Yet so much of this is too familiar. She pointed to the large rocket holes covering the walls of her home and chipping away at an exterior staircase. But this is damage from past wars.

“How it was before, it is like that now, always the same,” Petraj said. “None of this makes any difference.”