Croats Vote for Parliament Amid Fears of a New War : Election: Big victory is expected for the president’s nationalist party. Talks on Eastern Slavonia fail.

ZAGREB, Croatia — Croats voted for Parliament on Sunday in elections expected to strengthen President Franjo Tudjman’s mandate to use military force to retake the last piece of Serb-held land in Croatia.

Even as Balkan peace talks are set to begin in the United States, fears that a new war will break out here grew after the collapse late Saturday of negotiations over Eastern Slavonia, a sliver of Croatia bordering Serbia and held by Serbian separatists.

The failure to make progress on Eastern Slavonia means that any overall settlement for the former Yugoslav federation will be incomplete, U.S. officials said. Last week, American diplomats expressed optimism over a draft agreement between the Croatian government and rebel Serbs. But Sunday they changed their tune.

“We’re concerned that military action could disrupt the peace efforts,” said Peter Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to Croatia.

Tudjman called Sunday’s parliamentary elections nearly a year in advance to capitalize on his army’s victories in recapturing most of the land Serbs seized in a 1991 rebellion. The offensives in Western Slavonia in May and the Krajina in August were swift, stunning successes that cemented Tudjman’s image as the deliverer of an independent, unified Croatian state.

Sounding a central theme in the campaign leading to Sunday’s vote, Tudjman has repeatedly vowed to finish the job by sending the army to “liberate” the oil-rich, 850-square-mile Eastern Slavonia by Dec. 1 if diplomacy fails.

“We will free the rest of the occupied territory, if possible with peace. But if not possible with peace, we will use all means available,” Tudjman roared to a crowd of supporters during a closing rally Friday night.

Diplomats and analysts believe military action is all but inevitable. The West only mildly criticized the earlier government offensives, and Washington gave tacit approval to the Krajina takeover, which led to the flight of more than 180,000 Croatian Serbs and subsequent torching and looting of Serbian homes by Croatian forces.

The biggest concern among diplomats is that the rump Yugoslavia would be drawn into the fighting if Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic opts to defend his fellow Serbs, something he did not do in the two previous blitzes.

Thanks in part to the emotionally charged Eastern Slavonia theme, Tudjman’s nationalist party is expected to win big and take a step closer to what critics fear is the establishment of a one-party state. Voters will choose 127 members of the lower house of Parliament after an electoral campaign that international monitors said unfairly favored the ruling party by denying media access to opposition parties.

The government also rewrote election laws to give the vote to about 310,000 Bosnian Croats, most of whom are staunch nationalists and Tudjman’s natural supporters.

Efforts to resolve the Eastern Slavonia matter ran aground over the weekend when the Serbs voiced numerous objections to the proposed U.S.-drafted agreement. U.N. negotiators said they expect the talks to resume this week.