A GOOD SEASON FOR WAR

By JAMES L. GRAFF/SARAJEVO

Husein Dzevair had just served customers at his snack stand in Zagreb, when he heard the incoming rockets. He and his girlfriend Stoja Babic dived to the floor of their flimsy kiosk as more than 20 cluster bombs burst around them, wounding three customers, shattering glass, and puncturing cars as if they were made of paper. Shrapnel tore branches from trees around a nearby sandbox, where a sandcastle somehow remained intact. "My first thought was 'We're finished,' " said Babic. "I feel very, very lucky."

When spring comes to the Balkans, so do the rockets, the bullets and the artillery shells. In Croatia the cease-fire brokered by the U.N. in January 1992 has just suffered its most egregious breach yet. In Bosnia the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government and the rebel Serbs have both spent the winter arming and training. A four-month-old cease-fire between them expired on May 1. It had begun to break down weeks before, and with the warm weather, the conflict between the parties is sure to intensify. Meanwhile, the nearly 40,000 U.N. peacekeepers in the region are descending into a state of ever more irrelevance and danger, and the diplomats talk to no purpose.

The rocket attack on Zagreb, the Croatian capital of 1 million people, was the last stage in a classic round of Balkan escalation. It began on April 28 when a Croat stabbed an ethnic Serb motorist to death at a gas station along the highway linking Zagreb to eastern Croatia and Serbia. That crucial route runs through two of the four "U.N.-protected areas" that roughly correspond to the self-proclaimed "Republic of Serb Krajina" in Croatia. The Serbs answered the killing by blocking off the highway and slaying three Croatian drivers.

That, in turn, was justification enough for the Croatian government to launch its largest offensive since 1991, sending a total of 7,200 army and police troops into Sector West, as the U.N. calls it, from two sides. After a little more than 30 hours, the government proclaimed success in liberating the road and an adjacent railway line, and within two more days had subdued the last Serb pockets of resistance throughout the sector. The Croats reported a total of 42 dead among their forces and estimated Serb losses at between 350 and 450 men. In a televised address to the nation, a triumphant Croatian President Franjo Tudjman boasted of a "swift and great" victory carried out "in a skilled and excellent way."

The self-congratulatory tone was, of course, premature. As the bombs over Zagreb proved, the Krajina Serbs were in no way ready to swallow defeat, but they were quite prepared to kill civilians. Twelve rockets fell on the city. Some of them were confirmed to be Orkans, manufactured by Yugoslavia in partnership with Iraq, carrying antipersonnel warheads that spew out up to 288 deadly metal "bells," or bombs, packed with explosives and buckshot. The toll was six dead, 180 wounded.

"One battle does not mean a lost war," Krajina Serb "President" Milan Martic told a group of militiamen on Wednesday. "We have already responded to what Tudjman has done to you here; we bombed their cities yesterday and today. We did it for you." Nor is the tone conciliatory on the streets of Zagreb. "We should set up tents at every street corner for the Serbs who live here," suggested Ivan Palcic, 53. "That way they'll be killed when [the Serbs] attack and not us [Croats]."

All this in Croatia, which the U.N. liked to consider a tenuous success compared to the ongoing debacle in Bosnia. The attack on Zagreb marked a new nadir of humiliation for U.N. peacekeepers, who were variously ignored by attacking Croats, taken hostage by Krajina Serbs and dropped into the midst of a fire fight when they returned to the sector on Thursday under the scant cover of a U.N.-declared cease-fire. U.N. special representative Yasushi Akashi, who is head of the U.N.'s peacekeeping operation in the former Yugoslavia, managed after the second round of rockets to engineer a cease-fire in Sector West. But when he tried to fly into the sector on Thursday, the Croatians would not allow his helicopter to land. "Akashi has become a comic figure," says Jens Reuter of the Sudost Institute in Munich.

Or a pathetic one. Last week began with the spectacle of Akashi standing in the rain at Sarajevo's airport -- closed for aid flights since Bosnian Serbs shot up an American cargo plane on April 13 -- trying to spin into a success his failure to extend the cease-fire between the government and the Serbs. No one had signed anything, but all sides, he said, had "undertaken a solemn engagement to show maximum restraint." Unfortunately, even with a cease-fire agreement, the parties have not exactly been known for their restraint. While the cease-fire was still in effect, the Bosnian Serbs repeatedly shelled the so-called safe area of Bihac, and the Bosnian government launched successful offensives on Mount Vlasic to the northwest of Sarajevo and the Majevica Hills to the northeast.

Diplomacy has failed to move the conflict in Bosnia even a little toward a just peace-or any peace. Right now the Bosnian Serbs control 70% of Bosnian territory. The so-called Contact Group -- he U.S., Britain, Russia, France and Germany -- has a plan that requires the Serbs to reduce their share of the land to 49%. They have shown little interest. "We're not holding our breath for the Serbs to accept [the Contact Group plan] as the 'basis' for talks, the 'starting point' or anything else," says a top Administration official.

Hardly surprising, since the Bosnian Serbs and their reluctant patron in Belgrade, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, are masters at exploiting great power differences. The Russians tend to favor the Serbs, their historic allies; the Americans tend to favor the Muslims, who they feel are the clear victims; and the French are masterfully temporizing, which infuriates the Russians and the Americans. "I think there's a willingness to declare the Contact Group dead, but the alternative is so bleak that no one wants to face it," says a U.S. official.

Lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnians, as advocated by U.S. Senate majority leader Robert Dole, would necessitate a withdrawal of U.N. troops by NATO forces, a dangerous operation that could prove unpalatable in Washington if it meant sending U.S. soldiers. What's more, it would probably trigger an immediate response from the already heavily armed Bosnian Serbs, resulting in what a U.N. official indelicately calls a "Dolocaust." The Pentagon opposes Dole's plan, and he has postponed bringing it to the Senate floor until June at the earliest. If Congress passes it, which is likely if only to embarrass Clinton, who castigated George Bush in 1992 for being weak on Bosnia, Clinton will certainly veto it.

The likely prospect: years more of fighting, with time shifting the balance toward the Bosnian Muslim army, which has the advantage in manpower and has, its commanders claim, thrown off the remnants of recycled Soviet military doctrine to become a nimble fighting force with smaller units organized along nato lines. In the midst of the fighting, in all likelihood, will remain the U.N. troops. Removing them is dangerous, and besides, they provide the major powers with the ideal excuse for avoiding the use of force and relying on diplomacy instead: force would put the peacekeepers at risk. For that reason the peacekeepers arguably also guarantee that diplomacy will fail. As Warren Zimmermann, the last American ambassador to Belgrade, says, "Diplomacy without force against an adversary without scruples is useless."

It is worth remembering why the Balkan wars once caused so much outrage: the ethnic cleansing, the deliberate targeting of civilians and the trans-border aggression against Bosnia's internationally recognized sovereignty. At the Hague last month, the Bosnian Serbs' leader, Radovan Karadzic, their military commander, Ratko Mladic, and the former political head of their special police, Mico Stanisic, were formally placed under investigation as potential war criminals. Ex-cafa owner Dusan Tadic, a Bosnian Serb accused of murder and torture, was brought to the first such trial since Nuremberg and Tokyo. A gesture for the cause of civilization. But how much will it deter a future aggressor who has watched the world's stumbling response to Bosnia? --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Zagreb and J.F.O. McAllister/ Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by MASSIMO CALABRESI/ZAGREB AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON, WITH OTHER BUREAUS