Next Step : Croatia Fighting for Tourists With Repairs and Travel Subsidies : Many of its sunny Adriatic resorts are far from the current warfare. But Americans and Britons are still staying away.

Meet Vladimir Benas, frustrated tourism promoter par excellence in this Adriatic version of paradise.

“I don’t know what to do with myself,” Benas complains as he strolls the corniche along Opatija’s Kvarner Bay. Out on the water, a single sailboat tacks under an azure sky.

“I come to work each morning. I sit in my office for eight hours a day. I want to make money for my company. But do you know, last year I did not bring one single person from the United Kingdom to Opatija?”

The beleaguered Benas heads the Great Britain and Overseas Countries Department of Kvarner Express, a major tour operator in this faded former coastal outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is his job to bring vacationers here from Britain and the Americas.

The sun gives the same good value it always has in Opatija. The breezes caress as before, the balustrades and tall shuttered windows lend the same notes of elegance, and the prices are rock-bottom.

The former Yugoslav coast is famous for its spectacular rocky cliffs, its medieval walled cities, its yacht-friendly islands, its scampi dinners. Two coastal cities, Split and Dubrovnik, are so rich in antiquities that they hold spots on UNESCO’s list of world cultural heritage sites.

Still, only the hardiest Austrian and German tourists are to be found these days at the northernmost end of the Croatian coastline, lured by cheap prices four years after Croatia’s bloody 1991 war of independence from an imploding Yugoslav federation.

“I just love Opatija,” says Paul Ries, a white-haired Munich resident who had been coming here every spring for years but who had sat out the past three.

This year he gave in to the temptation of a package that included round-trip bus fare from Munich, a week’s seaside hotel room and all meals--including four-course dinners--for just $350.

But the Americans, British and others whom Benas seeks are still staying away, frightened by reports of fighting that recently included Serbian rocket attacks on Zagreb, the Croatian capital.

The worst of the recently renewed fighting is in Croatia’s Slavonia region, 150 miles as the crow flies from Opatija, and about six hours by road--when the roads are open. The main highway between here and the fighting is now closed, and in any case, a mountain range safely separates Opatija from the rest of the country.

In its location and, perhaps, in its heart, Opatija is closer to Italy than to the play of bloody nationalist passions to the east.

“Nothing has happened here,” Benas says. “But the Americans and English, they don’t know anything about distances. They have asked me if I used to go to Moscow for coffee” in Communist times.

Benas’ problem is a problem for all Croatia, which took most of the former Yugoslav federation’s famous coastline with it when it declared independence.

The young country’s prospects are very darkly clouded by the continuing war. Despite a privatization campaign, whole weeks go by when not a single share changes hands on the Zagreb stock exchange.

Croatia’s quickest and brightest hope for economic rejuvenation lies chiefly in its ability to attract foreign vacationers.

So, despite the fighting, the government has mounted a tourism campaign, commissioning a new sun-like logo by the Croatian pointillist Ivan Rabuzin, renovating the most heavily used border crossings and highways to seaside resorts and subsidizing international tour-bus operators and charter airlines.

There is even talk of turning old island lighthouses into exclusive condominiums, or creating “eco-tourism” trips promising swimmers frolics with tame dolphins.

Milivoj Jurisic, director of the Croatian Chamber of Economy’s tourism department, says that next year Croatia may push to crack the tough U.S. market, focusing on cities such as Chicago and Cleveland with sizable populations of Croatian immigrants.

But the next step--attracting private investors to upgrade Croatia’s “socially” owned coastal hotels and resort properties--is a stickier proposition.

Part of the problem is the existing ownership structure, a holdover from Communist times that lumps whole chains of hotels into single, unmanageable companies.

Still, the main worry is the fighting. Although the battles themselves have taken place far from the coast, Serbian forces have sometimes shelled such former seaside tourist meccas as Dubrovnik when they are losing ground in the interior.

“In terms of foreign investment, people are a little bit scared,” Jurisic says.

Even isolated Opatija has its mementos of war. After the 1991 fighting, the new Croatian government was left with about 200,000 refugees to feed and house--to say nothing of the 200,000 additional people who soon thereafter flooded over the borders from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Some of the unlucky homeless wound up living in barracks, and in metal containers--the kind that normally carry cargo on ships or trucks--but thousands more have landed in commandeered resort hotels on the coast.

In Opatija, for instance, the Zagreb government pays hotel managements about $5 per refugee per day and obliges them to feed the refugees and clean their rooms, just as if they were paying guests.

“They hang their laundry on the balconies,” Jurisic says. “It looks like a stable. This is a huge problem for tourism. People paying $100 a night, they don’t want to be next to a refugee. But what can the government do? These are human beings, and they have lost everything.”

Benas adds that whenever the refugees move out of a hotel, the entire building has to be renovated. But such fixing-up has not been necessary--much less possible--in many places yet, because few refugees have been able to return home.

First, the fighting has to stop. And then arrangements must be negotiated between the warring parties to return “ethnically cleansed” lands and houses to their original owners.

Even before this month’s outbreak of fighting in Croatia, there was little sign that the combatants were interested in letting refugees crisscross their way home.

That leaves tour floggers such as Benas striving for a semblance of a work life, as if everything were normal in Croatia.

Last year, when the country was quieter, Benas says, he mailed 1,185 flyers all over the world recommending Opatija as a place for relaxed business meetings.

“I got back 65 responses, and all of this yielded only one convention,” he says.

It was an industry forum, titled “The Challenge of Tourism in Croatia.”