Bosnian Serb Stronghold Distills Fears, Hatred : Balkans: Residents of Pale deny responsibility for the bitter ethnic conflict and blame Muslims for their plight.

She lives in a small wooden toolshed with her two teen-age children.

She is reduced to selling cigarettes and chewing gum to soldiers who saunter by the small market and lone newsstand here. It is a fate she blames entirely on the Muslims, who she says drove her from her home in nearby Sarajevo, killed her friends and tore apart her family.

“What insults me most is the Muslims talking about ‘our Bosnia,’ ” says 40-year-old Radmila, who worked as a department store clerk before fleeing Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, three years ago.

“If it is their Bosnia, then where will my children find a place to live? If my grandfather was born here, where will I go? . . . Sometimes we feel completely alone and isolated. You cannot imagine such an ugly feeling. You are gathered in a small place, and you have nowhere to go, and you have no place on this planet.”

Here in the strangely peaceful stronghold of the Bosnian Serbs, the fears and hatreds of all Serbs are concentrated, tended and nourished like plants in a greenhouse.

Obsessed with history’s atrocities against their people and sure that today’s world conspires against them, the Serbs of Pale cultivate a sort of messianic complex that shapes the thinking of the most vicious fighter and the most ordinary civilian.

With the fall of communism and the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation, as Slovenia, Croatia and then Bosnia-Herzegovina began to secede, Serbs lost their place of privilege and, in the view of many Serbs, their basic security.

Legitimate fears and ancient hatreds were then seized upon and distorted by unscrupulous political and military leaders to justify a massive land grab and Europe’s most brutal bloodletting since World War II.

Murder, rape, “ethnic cleansing”--horrors committed by all sides but primarily by Serbian militiamen--all in the name of an extreme nationalist view, helped make the Serbian leadership an international pariah.

Such ill repute was furthered last month when the Serbs, retaliating after air strikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, took hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers hostage and used them as human shields, inviting the wrath of the world onto Pale.

With isolation, the fears merely feed on themselves.

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Pale, a somewhat bucolic onetime ski resort where purple iris and flame-red poppies splotch the rolling green hills, is both politically and culturally isolated.

Outsiders are not welcome. Journalists--if they are allowed in--must obtain permits for the most minimal activity. Most buildings are small vacation homes and rundown structures left after the 1984 Winter Olympics at Sarajevo.

The “presidency” office is housed in the administration building of a motor factory; the “parliament” meets in the annex of a ski lodge.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic this week ordered a one-month closure of the handful of bars in Pale, and throughout Serb-controlled territory. Restaurants that serve only food must lock their doors by 10 p.m.

The move was apparently intended to keep conscripts sober so they can fight better and to effectively force residents home in time for the nightly Bosnian Serb television news, one of the Serbian leadership’s most valuable propaganda tools.

“Part of the blame [for the war] may lie with us, but I think the world is more to blame,” says Tanja Djukanovic, a 19-year-old student at the school in Pale that calls itself “University of Sarajevo, Serbian Republic.”

“Their main intention is . . . to destroy Serbia. It is not in [the West’s] interest that there be a Greater Serbia in Europe. When the world decides the war should be over, it will be over.”

Her friend Snezana Bojovic, 20, says the past three years of war have taught her “how to hate.” She allows that regular civilians should not be blamed for what their governments do. But she is outraged, among other things, at the treatment of Serbs in Croatia during a Croatian offensive several weeks ago to recapture Serb-occupied land.

The Serbs there, she is convinced, were slaughtered “like lambs.”

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Although some Serbian civilians were killed and some atrocities were committed in the taking of the Slavonia section of Croatia, no evidence has emerged to substantiate a massacre there.

So how does Bojovic know this happened? She saw it on the news.

Radmila says she wants peace. Everyone is sick of war and the ghastly uncertainty that fills their lives. But, she adds, “most of all we are afraid to fall under [the Muslims’] authority.”

Radmila supports herself and her two children with profits from selling cigarettes, about two dinars, or 80 cents, per carton. Friends help her out.

Friends like fellow street vendor Saja, 35, who also fled Sarajevo in April, 1992, at the start of the war. (Like most people interviewed in Pale, neither Radmila nor Saja wanted her last name published.)

Saja worked as a chemist in a factory in Sarajevo and now lives in the home of relatives with her small child and husband.

Bitterly, Saja remembers how people she once considered friends and colleagues turned on her when the war in Sarajevo started.

“The director of my company came to our apartment building,” she recalls. “I expected he would protect me. But when the [Muslim] troops came, he pointed out the Serb apartments and said, ‘These are the Chetniks.’ ”

Chetniks was the term used during World War II to describe the Serbian fighters that formed to resist the Axis invaders and Croatian collaborators and now refers to the most brutal and extreme of the Serbian nationalists.

“We had two houses. We had a job. We had everything,” Saja says. “We had to run with just the bags in our hands. Five of my neighbors who stayed were killed. The Muslim authorities claimed they were killed by snipers, but I think the Muslims entered their apartments and killed them.”

The Serbs surrounded and cut off Sarajevo that April, blocking most supply routes into and out of the capital. What followed was the gradual destruction of the city, with Serbian gunners shelling neighborhoods and almost every building of significance and Serbian snipers picking off thousands of residents, including children, the elderly and anyone who couldn’t run fast enough.

Muslim snipers also fire on Serbian areas and fire weapons from within Sarajevo, but the international community has determined that the Serbs have committed the vast majority of attacks on civilians and other atrocities.

Yet the people in Pale see things differently. The world is not told about Serbian victims, they argue. They are made to shoulder an unfair portion of the blame, they say.

“Every day we hope the situation will change, calm down,” Saja says. “I’d like to go back [to Sarajevo]. But I think wishes are bigger than possibilities. The whole world is against us.”

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Saja says she once called her apartment in Sarajevo and found a Muslim family living there.

As Saja speaks, a 56-year-old woman dressed all in black approaches.

“There can be no life with the Muslims!” she exclaims, her voice pitched with emotion.

The Muslims, she says, came to take away her son three years ago in Sarajevo. He escaped by jumping out their third-story window, she says, but they gunned him down as he fled through the streets.

“The same people we used to sit and have coffee with, suddenly they were killing us. How can I trust them again?” she asks.

Analysts in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, say the Bosnian Serbs, and particularly those in Pale, have been warped by a siege mentality created by fighting a militarily successful if politically disastrous war for more than three years.

“After three years in the trenches, the psychology is different,” psychologist Zarko Korac says. “They are encircled. They know they are doomed. They see themselves as outcasts. They isolate themselves, and the world agrees and joins in isolating them. They see themselves as the ultimate victims. There is no one to protect their rights, and they are convinced they will be exterminated.”

Such fatalism is dangerous, he says, because it voids the normal rules of society. It is used to justify horrible deeds, allowing many Bosnian Serbs to rationalize or deny what has happened.

Casting themselves as martyrs, many Bosnian Serb leaders have an exaggerated sense of themselves as historical figures and saviors, Korac says, a self-perception enhanced by the ease with which Karadzic and army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic are able to paralyze NATO and the United Nations.

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Zoran Djindjic heads the Serbian Democratic Party in Belgrade and has close ties with the Bosnian Serbs. He says they are living in several historical periods at once--and tend to mix them up. They regard the Bosnian Muslims as they do the 18th-Century Turks whose occupation of Serbia lasted for centuries.

“They say, ‘If we should die for our cause, then we shall die,’ Djindjic says. “They see it as a kind of Christian testing, as though they are being watched from above: ‘We will persevere and be saints and enter the Serbian history books.’ ”

In Pale, it is a Sunday at dusk, and people are strolling down the main street. Two men from the local motor factory, Moso and Mirko, are among the strollers.

Like many Serbs, their conversation is full of the past.

The Serbs suffered not only at the hands of the Ottoman Empire Turks, they point out, but also under the Nazis during World War II. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of Serbs were killed in Nazi concentration camps in Croatia. That Serbs were also guilty of atrocities in the past as well as now does not figure.

Both Mirko and Moso pause when asked if Serbs and Muslims can ever live together again.

“Maybe we can live together again,” Moso says, “but only after these generations who have seen such evil all die.”

Mirko does not believe even that is possible. He believes that there will have to be separate states.

“We were all Yugoslavs; I always believed in brotherhood. Now I have a different view. When bloodshed appears time and time again, only division is best.”