ZAGREB, CROATIA -- Ante Lazrovic, a 27-year-old Bosnian Croat refugee, was sleeping next to his pregnant wife in a rural Croatian town in Slavonia when thunderous knocks roused him at 3 a.m. "Get up. Go, go, go," boomed a Croatian military policeman. "Be at the bus station in half an hour, and keep your mouth shut." When his bus reached the military barracks here, soldiers told Lazrovic (not his real name) that he would be shipped back to Bosnia as a "volunteer" soldier. If he refused, he would be imprisoned and his Croatian citizenship revoked. Lazrovic, a Serbian concentration camp survivor hoping to put the Bosnian tragedy behind him, was stunned. "Not again," he thought, "not here in Croatia."
Lazrovic fled war-torn Bosnia last spring after three stints in Serbian-run camps. He had watched friends lined up and mowed down by machine-gun fire, had endured drunken Serbian soldiers who used his head as a drum for their chetnik anthems and had shed 44 pounds after eating just 5 1/2 ounces of bread a day. "My dream," he says, "was to make Croatia my home."
But with the Bosnian Army boosting its numbers and arms stocks, prospects for peace have never been bleaker. Belgrade is bracing for a Greater Serbian spring offensive, deploying Yugoslav Army troops and herding all fighting-age Bosnian Serbs back to the front. Croatia, on the other hand, is desperate to help the Croatian separatist army in Bosnia -- the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) -- hold land in Herzegovina and central Bosnia. As a result, Croatia is slipping thousands of Croatian regular troops into Bosnia while mobilizing Croats of Bosnian descent like Lazrovic.
After a scant medical examination ("two eyes, two arms, two legs -- you are fit"), the so-called volunteers get little training and no uniform insignia. "Do you think we are stupid?" laughs a soldier. "How would the West react if soldiers with HVO insignia were trained in Zagreb?" Despite talk of U.N. sanctions against Croatia, such a move might imperil the 280,000 Croatia-based Bosnian refugees.
Although Croatian President Franjo Tudjman argues that Croats fighting in Bosnia "voluntarily returned to counter Muslim aggression," Lazrovic insists "there wasn't a volunteer in the barracks." All the Croats rounded up have some ties to Bosnia, and, says one conscript, all are under orders: "Be silent and if anyone asks you, answer you are going to defend your own homes."
Lazrovic, determined to stay in Croatia, deserted before he could be sent back to Bosnia. Now in hiding with friends and waiting for his wife to have their first child, he fears he will have to return to the barracks. "They will find me," he says, shaking his head wearily. "No matter where I am, no matter what the system, they always do."
