Zagreb

Croatian artillery and mobile infantry pressed rebel Serbs in Balkan fighting Saturday that mocked diplomats who were scrambling to head off a full-scale war between Croatia and Serb forces. The United Nations said Croatian guns firing across the border from Bosnia-Herzegovina blasted the village of Cetina near Knin, the rebel capital in the Serb-administered Krajina region of Croatia. Other Croatian units were said to be pushing east into Serb-controlled areas of central Bosnia.

Mike Ivancic, a Croat who has lived most of his adult life in New York City, stood with his Croatian army unit on the front line of what was, until Tuesday, Serb-held territory. He relished victory. "I love this land, and we are willing to die fighting for it," he proclaimed as Croatian forces took control of the town that served as headquarters for Serbs who seized this portion of Croatia in their 1991 war of secession.

War reached this European capital Tuesday as rebel Serbs bombarded the heart of Zagreb in deadly revenge for a fierce Croatian army offensive that was swiftly driving Serbs from a four-year stronghold. The Croatian government late Tuesday said it had successfully recaptured part of the land seized by rebel Serb separatists in their 1991 war of secession. But earlier, Serb rocket attacks on the capital killed five people, wounded 120 and sowed terror in a city that had believed itself safe.

Zivko Popovich is a square-faced, gritty little man whose life capsized in the waves of ethnic hate that first began destroying the Yugoslav federation in the summer of 1991. By the time he found his bearings, Popovich and his family had landed in the ruins of this once-rich Danube River port town. Along with thousands of other refugees, they began again.

Stevan Sovilj's lined face and spare frame speak to his need for the $700 monthly pension he is owed for 41 years of work on the abandoned Zagreb-Split rail line, which passes through this rebel Serb stronghold. He pulls at the loose waistband of his snagged trousers to show that he has lost weight on the $40 he and his family are forced to live on each month amid the hardships of a prolonged rebellion and the haywire prices inflicted by war in the Balkans.

If Los Angeles were to have a new sister city, Zagreb, Croatia, might be a more appropriate nominee than one might at first suspect. I spent the beginning of January in Zagreb, a city that has been forced to provide shelter for more than 500,000 homeless people amid one of the most savage conflicts affecting Europe since the World War II. The last three years there have been horrific. At first, the city itself was under direct fire.

Croatian army troops gunned down at least 70 Serbian civilians and torched every building in 11 villages in an organized and brutal application of "scorched earth" tactics, the United Nations charged Thursday. In a separate report alleging human rights abuses by Croats, a U.N. refugee official said nationalist gunmen rounded up more than 500 Muslims from the divided city of Mostar and expelled them across a dangerous no-man's-land riddled with mines and corpses.

These are the scenes of war's aftermath Zvonko Kutlesa has witnessed today: shattered neighborhoods and churches, a mother and her small children surveying the wreckage that was once their home, armed local men in battle fatigues standing lonely guard on the front line against Serbian forces. For two helpless years in his Canoga Park apartment, Kutlesa has had to watch images like these from the war-ravaged former Yugoslavia.

The recent clashes between Muslim and Croat forces have demonstrated the reprehensible brutality that Croat military formations have displayed continually from the very beginning of this conflict. The junta in Zagreb will use any ugly means to further its pernicious onslaught in the Balkans, whether it be by bullying or the use of death squads. The massacre in the village of Ahinici is not an isolated event. This has been ongoing since 1991, when Croats "ethnically cleansed" the Serb population of Slavonia, a large area east of Zagreb.

It took the U.S. Army only five days to erect a sprawling field hospital at Zagreb Airport, yet before the soldiers could change from coveralls to scrubs, they were confronted with their first emergency. A Croatian bulldozer driver working under contract with the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or M.A.S.H., stumbled over a land mine buried by the Yugoslav People's Army when it beat a hasty retreat from the Croatian capital more than a year ago.