Refugee Serbs’ Exodus Turns Vengeful : Balkans: Expelled from Croatia, families seize homes from ethnic rivals.

The Roman Catholic priest had visitors. Two families of Serbian refugees, fleeing Croatia’s takeover of their native Krajina, barged into his home and claimed it as their own.

The priest was among scores of Croats in this and other towns in northern Serbia and north-central Bosnia who are being expelled or whose homes are being occupied by desperate, angry Serbian refugees, as one brutal ethnic purge gives rise to another.

Tens of thousands of people ejected by a victorious Croatian army continued to arrive in Yugoslavia on Saturday, with the number passing 100,000, and relief officials warned of a growing humanitarian catastrophe.

Many of the refugees were attacked by Croats as they fled their homes, and now they appear ready to exact revenge against minority Croats and Muslims at this end of their ordeal--all a sign of how intractable the ethnic wars of the Balkans are and how likely the violence is to continue.

In Banja Luka, a Bosnian Serb stronghold in northern Bosnia, U.N. officials reported “appalling” incidents of torture, murder and widespread expulsions of Muslims and Croats by retaliating Serbs.

In the Yugoslav town of Novi Banovci, 18 miles northwest of the capital, Belgrade, tensions were high Saturday. Most Croatian homes had been occupied by Serbs, residents said. Cars fresh from the Krajina region were parked in driveways; graffiti saying “occupied” were scrawled on some houses; red and blue Serbian flags draped from others.

In Novi Banovci and at least three other towns in Yugoslavia’s ethnically diverse Vojvodina region, Serbian refugees were telling ethnic Croatian residents to accept a “land swap” and leave for the Croatia that the refugees had been forced to vacate.

For the refugees occupying Father Tomislav Radisic’s parish house, next door to the Catholic church, it seemed only fair: Croats threw us out of our homes in Croatia; now we can throw them out of their homes in Serbia.

“Our Krajina was bigger than Vojvodina. We do not need it all. We will just take the Croat part,” said Mladen, 23, who was a member of the Krajina Serb militia. “It is the only way there can be lasting peace.”

Ten men and women sat around Radisic’s dining room table, sipping his plum brandy and talking to a reporter. The priest sat grimly to one side, smoking cigarettes with a trembling hand.

The refugees recalled their tortuous journey, having to rush ahead of an advancing army that shelled refugee convoys and torched their homes and properties. The families, including a pregnant woman, had to abandon all their belongings and ride in tractor-drawn carts for four days with little to eat or drink.

“We were not homeless people in the Krajina,” said Ugljesa, 35. “We were wealthy. We had a 16-hectare [40-acre] farm, three houses, two autos, vineyards and 100 sheep. Now we have nothing.”

The refugees asked that their last name not be published because their 75-year-old grandmother is missing in the Krajina and they feared Croatian reprisals against her.

“We are those so-called rebel Serbs,” said Ugljesa’s mother, Ljeposava, dressed in widow’s black with a scarf drawn tightly around her head. “We were not occupying Croatia--we lived there. We lived there for 700 years.”

Before they occupied the parish house, the refugees said, they asked a Croatian resident if they could move into his place, but he threatened to cut their throats.

“The next time we will not ask,” Ljeposava, 56, said. “Who asked us if we wanted to leave?”

One element of the hatred between Croats and Serbs is their religious difference--Serbs are Christian Orthodox, Croats are Catholic--and the refugees reminded Radisic of that.

“You are a Catholic and, I am sure, good for your people,” Ugljesa’s bearded brother, Milan, told the priest. “But I do not trust you.

“We are living together because we must. You will not lose a hair on your head because I am a correct man.”

A few blocks away, the Croatian man who the Serbs said had threatened to slit their throats gave a different version of the story. He said the Serbs burst into his home and threatened to kill him if he didn’t allow them to move in. He refused, he said, because they were so rude, and they eventually left.

The man, a 73-year-old retired officer from the Yugoslav army who insisted his name not be used, said a firefighting brigade from the Krajina town of Petrinja then showed up at his doorstep. They were polite, he said, so he allowed them to stay in his house and several neighbors’ houses. The red firetruck was parked on his back patio.

“Everyone here is very frightened,” he said. “There is no Croat house that has not been occupied. They can make a lot of trouble.”

The government of Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic--for whom the refugee crisis is a major political liability--dispatched police to the Vojvodina towns in an apparent effort to prevent the takeovers from spiraling out of control. But on Saturday, that was having only limited effect.

The United Nations said 50 expelled Croats had arrived in the Croatian town of Osijek, having crossed through Hungary to avoid Serbian territory, and that hundreds were reported en route.

“In general, we think the government really wants to clamp down on it,” said Fernando del Mundo, spokesman in Belgrade for the United Nations’ refugee agency. “But obviously they can’t take care of people on a 24-hour basis.”

The situation in Banja Luka was even more critical. An estimated 80,000 Serbian refugees have descended on the city, many forced to sleep in the streets. The first suicides have been reported, and expulsions are becoming increasingly violent, U.N. officials said.

Among the incidents reported by the United Nations: An elderly Muslim couple was killed after being tortured repeatedly by Krajina soldiers. A Krajina soldier shot to death a Croatian man who tried to protect a neighbor from expulsion; the dead man’s widow was then expelled by a Serbian family.

Elsewhere in the former Yugoslav federation, Bosnian and Croatian armies appeared to be capitalizing on the Serbs’ current position of weakness and launched offensives in central and southeast Bosnia on Saturday, U.N. officials said.

The picturesque medieval town of Dubrovnik, on Croatia’s southern Adriatic coast, was reported under heavy artillery attack, with substantial damage to the airport. The shelling may have come from Bosnian Serb positions responding to a reported Croatian army attack on the Serb-held town of Trebinje, where thousands of Serbian civilians have been seen fleeing.

Such an attack could be part of a Croatian army drive to push Bosnian Serbs out of artillery range of Dubrovnik, U.N. officials said.

And in the first major offensive by Bosnian government forces since June’s failed attempt to break the siege of Sarajevo, the Muslim-dominated army launched a tank and artillery assault in central Bosnia toward the Serb-held town of Donji Vakuf, with the possible aim of cutting a Serbian supply route.

The Croats’ stunning rout of the Krajina Serb army has taken the military advantage away from Serbian forces for the first time in four years of war, and both the Croats and Bosnian government forces are expected to try to build on their gains by pushing back Serbian positions in the coming weeks.

On the diplomatic front, the State Department announced in Washington that a U.S. team led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke will visit Sarajevo, Belgrade and Zagreb, the Croatian capital, this week to alternately threaten and cajole Balkan leaders into moving toward a diplomatic settlement of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Holbrooke--accompanied by Robert Frasure, Washington’s special envoy to the former Yugoslav federation, and other U.S. officials--will report to Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia on the results of a week of high-level consultations between White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Russia. The Holbrooke delegation is scheduled to leave Monday from London, the last stop on Lake’s itinerary.

State Department spokesman David Johnson said Lake and Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff have been exploring “new ideas and approaches” for a diplomatic solution in Bosnia following the defeat of separatist Serbs in the Krajina.

U.S. officials say the plan combines certain incentives, such as the relaxation of economic sanctions against Serbia if President Milosevic uses his influence to rein in Bosnian Serb forces, with the threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes if the Bosnian Serbs resume attacks on U.N.-designated “safe areas” in Bosnia. But officials have provided very few details of how the American initiative would work.

In Moscow, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament called on President Boris N. Yeltsin to withdraw unilaterally from the U.N. economic sanctions on Yugoslavia and to clamp a trade blockade on Croatia.

The bill, adopted by a one-vote majority in a special session of the Duma, does not bind Yeltsin but increases pressure on him to back Russia’s traditional allies, the Serbs, in the Balkan fighting. Unless the bill is blocked by the upper house within 14 days, Yeltsin must either sign it or veto it.

Yeltsin said Thursday that Russia might lift sanctions unilaterally against Belgrade unless the international community decides to abolish them soon. The United States and other Western countries are reluctant to do so while the fighting continues.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev told reporters that he hopes for a breakthrough in talks today with Lake. He said he would press for a lifting of sanctions against Belgrade to encourage forces in Serbia who back a peace settlement.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster in Washington and Richard Boudreaux in Moscow contributed to this report.