A GOOD SEASON FOR WAR

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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]."