Serbian Leader's Warlords Loath to Give Up the Fight : Yugoslavia: Milosevic, seeking a U.N. bailout, finds he may have created a monster in occupied Croatia.

By CAROL J. WILLIAMS

Feb. 6, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — Like the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, done in by a monster of his own creation, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic is now endangered by the nationalist rebels he brought to political life.

His surrogates, such as Milan Babic in Croatia’s Krajina region and Goran Hadjic from the Serbian occupational government in eastern Croatia, have defied their master’s orders and taken on lives of their own.

Milosevic, the nationalist strongman, has abandoned his vision of a Greater Serbia and focused on soothing the riled masses in his own republic who are disenchanted with the war against Croatia that has brought them poverty instead of glory. He has called for United Nations intervention, hoping foreign troops will protect his fatigued fighters from reprisals by Croats now threatening to reclaim the third of their republic lost in seven months of war.

He needs the U.N. intervention to create an illusion of victory and to assure his wavering supporters that the costly conflict is over and no more Serbian lives will be lost.

But his deputized warlords, including Babic, have been sold out in the bargain. They now face vanquished and vengeful Croats without Belgrade’s army and weapons to back them up. Angry at having been manipulated into sparking a deadly conflict they cannot win on their own, Milosevic’s political surrogates have turned on their mentor and sabotaged his rescue by U.N. peacekeepers.

Milosevic’s lost influence over his puppet theater threatens more than his own political power. The renegade proxies who fought his battle with Croatia promise to reignite the Yugoslav conflict that has already taken 10,000 lives.

Resistance to U.N. intervention could be stifled with a swift, sure crackdown by the Yugoslav People’s Army, ostensibly under the control of the pro-Milosevic federal presidency.

But the army, too, has been transformed by Milosevic into a nationalist force committed to his original objectives. Just because Milosevic no longer seeks a Greater Serbia doesn’t mean that the forces he marshaled to secure it have given up the quest.

The federal army lost its mission and its provider when the Yugoslav federation began disintegrating with the secession last June of Slovenia and Croatia. A staunchly Communist and pampered fighting force that now consumes almost 90% of the Serbian budget, the military hierarchy may continue to battle for a larger state to support it.

“Milosevic has found himself incapable of delivering his basic promise, his idea of a Greater Serbia in which all Serbs could live in one state,” said Kemal Kurspahic, editor of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, one of the few Yugoslav publications still presenting a multi-ethnic view. “But these monsters he created have come back to haunt him. He has no way of controlling them now that they see the war as a struggle for their own survival.”

Milosevic was the mastermind behind an August, 1990, uprising among ethnic Serbs in Krajina, the revolt that was launched from Babic’s mountain stronghold of Knin and that gradually escalated into full-scale war. He also engineered a creeping takeover of federal functions, giving him exclusive access to the Yugoslav coffers and de facto command of the federal armed forces.

Serbian leaders in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina know they are vulnerable if federal forces withdraw. That is why they have taken turns blocking the U.N. deployment plan that requires the army to leave Croatia and all guerrilla forces to disarm.

When Babic refused to give U.N. Undersecretary General Marrack Goulding permission to deploy foreign forces in the vast territory he rules, the U.N. envoy left Yugoslavia and put the mission on indefinite hold.

Babic was summoned to Belgrade for a marathon 40-hour weekend session called by the federal presidency. But he stood his ground and denounced a statement that all parties to the conflict support U.N. intervention.

The federal presidency, controlled by Milosevic, said that “state measures” will be relied on to subjugate rebel forces in Krajina, a code word from the Communist lexicon referring to the use of armed force.

Babic has accused the Belgrade leadership of bluster and warned that Serbs throughout the remnants of Yugoslavia would unite and repel any attempt to impose military rule in Krajina. His words were backed up by 4,000 armed supporters in Knin, who rallied late Monday in solidarity with their leader.

Most federal soldiers deployed in Krajina are local Serbs, loyal to the Knin leadership, making them unreliable for the daunting task of physically disarming Babic’s guerrillas. For the army to carry out the presidency’s vague threat to subjugate Krajina, a massive deployment of troops would be needed from elsewhere; they also would have to move through volatile territory in Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Serbian militants in Bosnia-Herzegovina might also come to Krajina’s side, since they share Babic’s determination to remain allied with Serbia and not be abandoned to live as a minority in an independent state.

Even the army high command in Belgrade might rebel against a presidential order to disarm Krajina and any Bosnian forces who turn on Milosevic. Bosnia-Herzegovina is home to much of Yugoslavia’s defense industry, and the army would need unencumbered passage through that republic and Krajina to have access to vital Adriatic ports.

Another political land mine laid by Milosevic is the Serbian occupation government he installed in the conquered regions of eastern Croatia, which Belgrade now refers to as the Serbian Autonomous Region of Slavonija, Baranja and West Srem. It is this ravaged part of Croatia over which Goran Hadjic ostensibly rules. But under the U.N. deployment plan, Croats, Hungarians and others chased out by the Serbian forces would be allowed to return to their homes, undermining Hadjic’s authority--and security--in the region now protected by the federal army.

Hadjic, who calls himself prime minister of the region, has seesawed in his support for a U.N. deployment. He has officially sided with Milosevic in endorsing foreign intervention, but he earlier joined Babic in warning that Serbs in his area would be endangered if the army pulled out. His stated support for the U.N. deployment would likely be reneged on if the obstacle presented by Babic were somehow removed.

But Hadjic’s position on the U.N. deployment is likely to prove irrelevant. True power in the lawless, heavily fortified area is vested in the paramilitary forces that overran eastern Croatia last fall.

“We know there is a possibility that Milosevic will betray us, because of the West’s economic blockade,” confided one fighter, who insisted that Serbian irregulars would never lay down their arms. “Ideologically, we are united behind Milosevic. But if he abandons us, we will fight to the last to protect this Serbian territory.”

Guerrilla leaders like Zeljko Raznjatovic, a Belgrade underworld figure who goes by the name of Arkan, have also made clear their allegiance to the cause of Serbian liberation, rather than to the political figures who dispatched them to fight. “If there is any fighting, I will be on the front lines with my Serbian Tigers,” Arkan said, referring to the bazooka-toting guerrillas he commands from a regimented training camp in the town of Erdut. “The Ustashe (Croats) will not stop short of their goal of genocide of the Serbian people. It’s either us or them.”

Milosevic’s failure to rein in his militants has cost him U.N. intervention, at least in the short term, and allowed Croatia to regroup and rearm for a threatened second battle to win back lost land.