NEWS ANALYSIS : Croatia Gambles the West Won’t Stand in Its Way

The world be damned, Croatia is acting swiftly and with confidence as it reconquers territory seized by Serbian separatists four years ago and, it hopes, cleanses the region of those Serbs at the same time.

“The Croatians recognized that they might never have a better chance--and they took it,” said a European diplomat.

The invasion gamble by Croatia’s nationalist President Franjo Tudjman, who has turned aside international condemnation to plunge the Balkans into yet another war, hinges on several factors:

* Hesitancy by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade to send his army to the rescue of his disciples, the Krajina Serbs.

* A sluggish response from the Serbian army in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, reeling from its first major battlefield losses in 40 months of war and from a bitter struggle dividing its leadership.

* A conviction that the West, disgusted by repeated Bosnian Serb excesses and the impotence of international peace seekers, will allow the Croats to get away with it.

Ultimately, the fighting shows once again that the former republics of the disintegrated Yugoslavia are inextricably linked, however much each tries to go its own way. If Croatia recaptures the Krajina--on Saturday it took Knin, the rebel Serbs’ capital--there are serious implications for every shard of former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito’s failed dream.

Thus far, Milosevic, whose vision of an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia” inspired the Krajina and Bosnian Serbs, has reacted mildly to the Croatian offensive, condemning it but, through his proxies, suggesting that the Krajina Serbs are at least partially to blame for their fate.

Belgrade’s state-run Politika newspaper, which Milosevic controls, chided Serbian rebels for mishandling their battles and for creating their own untenable situation.

Sending Krajina forces across the border into Bosnia to join Bosnian Serbs in attacking the Muslim Bihac pocket may in retrospect prove to have been a fatal blunder. It gave the Croats, militarily aligned with Bosnia now, a legal excuse to attack inside Bosnia, cutting supply lines to Knin.

Diplomats and analysts have long suggested that Milosevic may be willing to sacrifice the Krajina area--a poor and distant region that is militarily most difficult to defend and difficult to supply in the best of times. The Krajina Serbs are considered the poor, hillbilly cousins of the Serbs of Belgrade.

Such a sacrifice, some believe, would have to come in exchange for something: namely, the oil-rich, fertile “Eastern Slavonia” section that includes cherished Vukovar and borders Serbia. Whether Tudjman would abandon that chunk of territory to the Serbs in tacit exchange for Krajina, as some speculation suggests, remains to be seen. Senior Western diplomats here believe it unlikely.

Sacrificing the Krajina could also give Milosevic something he most wants: Bosnia. As the Croatian army overruns Knin and other key towns in the Krajina, tens of thousands of Serbian refugees and soldiers are fleeing into northern and central Bosnia.

They will be angry, defiant and, perhaps, eager to establish Bosnia once and for all as their homeland, U.N. analysts said Saturday.

This is an extremely ominous development for the Muslim-led Bosnian government in Sarajevo, which remembers all too well the deal widely reported to have been struck by Tudjman and Milosevic in 1991, wherein the two strongmen schemed to divvy up Bosnia between them.

The war in Bosnia, then, would probably intensify, the Bosnian Serbs having just completed the successful capture of two of the last three Muslim pockets in eastern Bosnia and hell-bent on consolidating control of most of the country.

The arriving Croatian Serbs would solve the Bosnian Serb army’s problem of manpower shortages while bringing with them a sizable arsenal of heavy weapons. The civilians would be used to fill villages emptied of Muslims, thus further complicating future resettlements.

“You’ll have a lot of pretty upset, militant Croat Serbs flowing into this country,” a U.N. official in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo said by telephone. “Now that the Krajina may be finished, you have a serious problem for the Muslims.”

But there are drawbacks too for the Bosnian Serbs. As strategically important as the new arrivals may be, someone has to feed and clothe them. They may eventually number 100,000. Independent of whatever international aid becomes available, the Serbs would face the prospect of a new humanitarian drama on a scale that can only sap scarce Bosnian Serb resources.

For now, the Bosnian government must cheer from the sidelines for a Croatian victory. Sarajevo and Zagreb--which fought their own war in 1992-93--are aligned militarily in their defense of the Bihac pocket, and politically in a U.S.-backed federation created to govern a postwar Bosnia. But the federation is weak, and neither side views it with special enthusiasm.

“The Bosnian government still has to put up a brave face and say how great the Croats are, but that may end,” said a Western analyst.

The Bosnian army crossed into Krajina on Saturday in at least nominal support of their newfound Croatian allies.

Any combat response by the Bosnian Serb army to the Croatian offensive, however, was thrown further into doubt with Friday’s announcement by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that he was replacing Gen. Ratko Mladic as head of the army.

Karadzic’s attempt to demote Mladic, a popular former Yugoslav army officer who personally directed last month’s brutal conquest of the Muslim safe areas of Srebrenica and Zepa, appears to be the product of a power struggle between the two Serbian leaders.

Karadzic, in announcing Mladic’s new position as adviser to coordinate defense with the Krajina Serbs, blamed Mladic for battlefield setbacks, including last month’s loss of two southwestern Bosnian towns to the Croats.

But it is Mladic, not Karadzic, who continues to enjoy Milosevic’s most overt support, and he will not relinquish power quietly. On Saturday, Mladic issued a statement declaring he was still in charge of the army and branding Karadzic’s move as illegal. The confrontation is bound to cause further turmoil within the Bosnian Serb army, making it less likely that the Bosnian Serbs will mobilize quickly to aid the Krajina Serbs, despite Karadzic’s pledge to do so.

Victory for Croatia would amount to the most significant Serbian defeat in the Balkan war.

However encouraging that might be to some bystanders, it’s not clear that it will improve Croatian standing in the international community, already fuming at human rights violations and attacks on U.N. peacekeepers.

At least three peacekeepers and numerous civilians were reported killed in the first two days of Croatia’s offensive.

Nevertheless, Tudjman’s government, which in the last three years has flouted a U.N. arms embargo while amassing and equipping a first-rate army under the uncritical, unquestioning eyes of the West, appears convinced that it will not be hindered by any concerted international response.

Aside from the usual condemnation from world leaders--that of Washington has been conspicuously tepid--Croatia can count on the general impotence of the United Nations to mount any kind of effective deterrence, and on the general inability of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries to act in unison.

In fact, the only NATO reaction thus far, even after Croatian forces killed a Danish U.N. peacekeeper and wounded others, was to bomb Croatian Serb positions, not government forces.

NATO says the Serbs had locked on to its aircraft, but the Serbs are not likely to see the action as neutral. Neither are the Croats.

Wilkinson reported from Vienna and Montalbano from Zagreb.