NEWS ANALYSIS : Serb Attacks on Croats Threaten to Widen War

When he dispatched troops into the Serb-held enclave of Western Slavonia, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman hit at the one military target he knew he could grab. But the wrathful reply from his Serb enemies has exacted an unexpectedly grim toll and pushed this bloodied region to the brink of an even wider war.

For the second day Wednesday, rebel Serbs attacked Zagreb with shrapnel-spewing missiles that hit the capital city’s main children’s hospital and the National Theater. One police officer was killed and more than 60 people were wounded, including dancers of the Danube Ballet troupe who were rehearsing in the theater.

The lunchtime attacks in downtown Zagreb and at the airport came in reprisal for the Croatian capture of territory that the Serbs had held since their 1991 war of secession. Serbs at that time seized one-third of Croatia in fighting that killed 10,000 people.

While the rocket attacks on Tuesday were stunning and horrific, with five people killed and more than 120 wounded, Wednesday’s assault provided another grisly surprise--that the Serbs would follow up their actions and so brazenly strain any effort by the Croatian government to show restraint.

In a private meeting with foreign ambassadors on Wednesday, Mate Granic, Tudjman’s foreign minister, said his government would not retaliate for the shelling. But the president said later in a nationally televised broadcast that a single additional Serb assault will invite “most decisive steps.”

“If there is a third time, they (the Croatians) are not going to waste any time,” said a European diplomat who attended the private meeting. “I don’t know how or where, but they will retaliate.”

Croatian forces have moved to strategic Mt. Troglav, sources say, within artillery range of the town of Knin, headquarters of the Croatian Serbs who occupy a long swath of the country, known as the Krajina. About 1,000 Krajina Serbs have been reported fleeing from the Knin area in anticipation of reprisals from the Croatian military.

And in Zagreb, calls for revenge are mounting as shock and horror quickly turn to rage. Even a cease-fire declared Wednesday did little to reassure panicked citizens.

“This is horrible, horrible--a crime!” cried Dr. Zaren Tolic at the children’s hospital, where missiles had injured 10 people and killed a police officer. The corridors of the five-story facility were carpeted with broken glass, and several hundred child patients cowered in underground bomb shelters.

“These devices are made to kill people, not destroy buildings,” Tolic said of the Orkan (Hurricane) rockets that for the second day had wreaked havoc, shattering Zagreb’s relative sense of security and sending residents fleeing streetcars, their homes and university lecture halls to find safety. The rockets are armed with cluster bomb warheads that fling ordnance over a wide area.

The bomblets that fell around Zagreb’s elegant 19th-Century Austro-Hungarian National Theater wounded 21 ballet dancers. News reports said the injured included Almira Osmanovic, Zagreb’s most famous ballerina, who suffered a minor shrapnel wound to the leg.

The panic and uncertainty that are settling into a new Croatian psychosis have the political consequence of strengthening the hand of nationalist extremists who are the most intolerant of Serbs, said Zagreb University historian Ivo Goldstein.

The bitter hatreds felt by many Croats and Serbs helped make the 1991 war here particularly brutal. The Serbs rebelled when Croatia declared its independence from the Yugoslav federation in 1991. Reopening that conflict now pits the former federation’s two largest ethnic groups against each other.

But Tudjman knows that he will probably have quite a different fight on his hands if he tries to recapture other Serb enclaves in Croatia. The Western Slavonia pocket was by far the easiest of the Serb areas to conquer, and it is widely believed that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic--who still wields the most influence where the Serbs are concerned--was willing to let it go.

Milosevic and his Serb-led Yugoslav army might be obliged to act, however, if Tudjman goes after land more precious to the Serb leadership, diplomats and analysts say.

Yet there also are signs of trouble within the Serb camp that make the rebels less formidable an opponent than they have been for most of the Balkan conflict, diplomats and U.N. officials say. Key leaders are said to be divided between hard-liners, who are willing to provoke all-out war, and pragmatists, who are more interested in seeking an end to the Serbs’ international isolation.

Militarily, the Serbs, while still better armed than their Croatian and Bosnian foes, are overextended, their fewer numbers stretched to cover large portions of conquered territory.

Milosevic, whose chief diplomatic mission these days is to have international sanctions against the rump Yugoslavia--reduced to Serbia and Montenegro--lifted, took the unusual step of condemning both the Croatian offensive and the Serb response. Some analysts think he is prepared to write off the Krajina Serbs, whom Belgrade regards as something equivalent to hillbilly cousins.

Even as U.N. special envoy to the Balkans Yasushi Akashi negotiated the agreement earlier Wednesday, Serb missiles were slamming into downtown Zagreb, despite his admonition to hard-line Krajina Serb leader Milan Martic the day before that rocket attacks on civilian population centers were “totally inadmissible.”

And late Wednesday, some Krajina leaders were insisting, contrary to what Akashi said in Zagreb, that the cease-fire included a provision for Croatian troops to withdraw from the territory they have recaptured.

“The question in Knin is who is saying what and who has his finger on the button,” said one diplomat. “Apparently, the (hard-liners) do.”

The cease-fire, Akashi said, provides for Serb militias to hand over their heavy weapons to U.N. monitors and for any Serbs who wish to leave to do so freely.

The fighting this week appears to have imperiled a broader political-economic agreement for Croatia, a pet project of U.S. and Russian diplomats here who pinned on it enormous hopes for peace. Under the agreement, the Zagreb-Belgrade highway was reopened last December for the first time since the war.

It was the shutting down of that highway by the Serbs last weekend that provided the final spark for Croatia to unleash troops that had been building up in the area since November. Croatia said Wednesday that it would reopen the highway now that it has taken control of the Serb enclave that straddles it. But the road was one element in a larger plan that included limited autonomy for the Serbs, and the future of Croat-Serb cooperation now seems doubtful.

Akashi was pessimistic, saying, “I am deeply worried the latest events may impinge upon one of the brightest hopes for the future of (these) people.”