St. Nicholas Comes to War-Torn Croatian Town : Peace accord: Serbian youngsters dare to hope for conflict’s end. But threats and bravado pose obstacles.

The St. Nicholas holiday has come and gone the past few years with little excitement in this riverfront town, the scene of the most devastating fighting between Serbs and Croats at the start of the Balkan war.

It never seemed quite right amid the rubble and broken lives to bring youngsters together for the festive celebration observed Tuesday by Eastern Orthodox Christians, in which good boys and girls get gifts at the onset of the Christmas season.

“We always think the war may come back,” said 11-year-old Teodora Glisanovic, a sandy-haired fifth-grader. “I just hope and hope the peace will last.”

This St. Nicholas Day, for the first time since 1991, there was some reason to believe that it may. Though fraught with troubles and ambiguities, a peace deal reached last month is tenuously taking hold here and across Eastern Slavonia, a tiny region of Croatia seized by rebel Serbs but destined to return to Croatian control.

And to the delight of Teodora and her friends, peace brought St. Nicholas to town too.

Most Serbs in Vukovar still refuse to talk about handing the town to Croats, saying they would rather leave--or fight--than live under the rule of their Roman Catholic enemies.

On Tuesday, a military parade through town, featuring the notorious paramilitary commander Zeljko “Arkan” Raznjatovic, marked four years to the day since Serbs laid claim to a chunk of Croatian territory, although all but Eastern Slavonia has since been reconquered by the Croats.

The bravado has raised fears from Washington to Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, that the fragile truce here could shatter and possibly unsettle the larger Balkan peace agreement being implemented in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Croatian officials have added to the uncertainty, issuing vague threats about what will happen if the region’s status is not cleared up.

“If peace breaks down in Eastern Slavonia, we can easily see the negative effects it will have on peace-building in Bosnia,” Thorvald Stoltenberg, an outgoing U.N. peace negotiator, warned this week.

But some actions here are beginning to speak louder than the vitriol, creating a glimmer of hope that tranquillity could prevail.

International peace enforcers are preparing to bring in heavy weapons to demonstrate their resolve to guarantee peace.

Local Serbian troops are being demobilized, and the Yugoslav army--a key backer of the rebel Serbs in 1991--is withdrawing from posts across the Danube River in Serbia.

A new kindergarten is opening this week, and another one is under construction. The downtown market is booming--a few vendors even have begun selling Croatian products--and some merchants are making modest repairs to damaged buildings.

Businessman Mihailo Katalina is even building an indoor carwash, an auto supply store, a cafe and a new apartment under one roof, at an investment, he says, of $200,000.

“If nobody goes, I won’t go either,” he said.

And on the eve of the St. Nicholas holiday, Teodora Glisanovic and her classmates made local history, marking the occasion in public for the first time since their young lives became captive to the bloody struggles of the adult world around them.

Teodora and about 20 other youngsters graced a makeshift runway in a fashion show for children sponsored by the Serbian Cultural Center. The hourlong event, held Monday in a drafty auditorium near the ruins of the city’s main department store, ended with a local Eastern Orthodox priest telling the story of St. Nicholas and doling out candy Santa Claus-style to a mob of 150 shrieking children.

“Give it to me! Give it to me!” they yelped excitedly.

“Slowly! Slowly!” Father Jovan Radivojevic protested with glee.

It was a rare scene of spontaneity and joy among Vukovar’s youngest witnesses to war. Mirjana Glisanovic, Teodora’s mother, was in the standing-room-only crowd of parents and friends.

“This is helping our children forget,” she said. “They see the war all the time on our faces, they hear it in our voices. We need to do things like this to show them how life will go on.”

Though shells have not landed on Vukovar in four years, most of the city remains an eerie battlefield, with street after street of ruined homes and buildings frozen in the December snow. The threat of renewed bloodshed has haunted residents day and night since the city was taken by rebel Serbs in November 1991.

Just last month, on the eve of the Dayton, Ohio, peace talks, the Croatian army was poised to attack if a deal was not finalized. In a separate accord reached in conjunction with the Bosnia peace settlement, Vukovar and the surrounding wedge of Serb-held territory will become an international protectorate for up to two years before reverting to Croatian control.

The 14-part agreement is ambiguous in its language but clear in its intent: Eastern Slavonia should surrender peacefully--including disarming its soldiers--in exchange for guarantees that the 170,000 Serbs there will be allowed to remain and will be treated fairly and humanely by Croatian authorities.

It is a tall order, and one that some U.N. officials worry could be too difficult for the world organization, which has been widely criticized for its ineffectiveness in Bosnia and Croatia.

A small peacekeeping force of 1,600 Belgians and Russians has patrolled Eastern Slavonia since 1992, when the United Nations launched a peacekeeping mission in Croatia. The Belgians and Russians will remain, with a far stronger military capability, but it is unclear who will be joining or commanding them.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has called for a 9,300-strong peace enforcement force, but U.N. officials say privately that it is unlikely they will be able to muster more than half that amount.

As a high-stakes sideshow to the Bosnia peace accord, and one that is unlikely to have any formal NATO involvement, the Eastern Slavonia deployment is seen as unglamorous and too risky for many countries.

“The big European countries--Britain, France--won’t touch it, and the Eastern Europeans are only interested in going together with NATO,” one U.N. official said. “The only taker so far is India.”

Vukovar Mayor Slavko Dokmanovic, who helped negotiate the peace deal, said the Serbs have requested that U.S. troops be part of the deployment. He said Serbs believe that the Croatian government would be less likely to resort to force, and more likely to live up to its human rights assurances, if U.S. soldiers stood in clear view.

But the Clinton administration, already taking a beating in the U.S. Congress for sending troops to Bosnia, has shied away from sending forces to Croatia.

Dokmanovic said local Serbs are disappointed but have no choice but to trust the world with their fate.

“Only someone who has been beaten knows how painful it is,” Dokmanovic said. “The conflict here was very fierce, and the tensions of the wars still exist. Without the international community, we can’t achieve peace. It is our only hope.”