DIVIDED BY HATE

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The peace pact is supposed to put a stop to ethnic cleansing, but the practice continued a week after the signing, when 93 ill and elderly Muslims in the Serb-held Banja Luka region were driven into Bosnian government--held territory. Last week they were joined by up to 250 more victims. These Muslims were expelled by Serbs who had earlier been ethnically cleansed from Muslim-held territory. The Serbs were resettled around Banja Luka and proceeded, as a U.N. official puts it, to "kick out their hosts." Right now Bosnian Croats are also getting in some last licks, despite the pact. They are supposed to give up Serb towns captured in a fall offensive, and they are doing so, but not before looting and burning the houses, hoping to hand back only charred ruins.

The hatreds hindering reconciliation come sharply into focus in the Sarajevo suburb of Ilidza, from which Serb forces shelled the Bosnian capital for almost four years. It is one of a handful of suburbs that will revert to Bosnian-government control, and several thousand Ilidza Serbs shouted defiance at a rally after the Dayton signing. Jovan Bugarin was one who talked of armed resistance: "Everybody here has guns. And we will send our children out on the streets. The NATO soldiers won't kill children. Or we will drag NATO soldiers through the streets like in Somalia."

This may be posturing, but it seems unlikely the Muslims who were driven out or fled to Sarajevo can ever peacefully return to Ilidza. Jasna Hadzimehmedovic, a Muslim fashion designer, left early in the war with her mother, but her father stayed behind and was arrested and tortured before he managed to escape. "I will never forget what he looked like when he joined us in Sarajevo," says Hadzimehmedovic. "He had cigarette burns all over his face and hands and this utterly forlorn and empty look in his eyes." As in Ilidza, so in the rest of Bosnia: the expectation that refugees will return to their old homes seems wildly unrealistic. Says Kris Janowski, a U.N. official in Sarajevo: "It is ludicrous to talk about people going back. We are still trying to get them out because their lives are in danger."

It is not only the Serbs and Muslims who despise each other; both despise, and are despised by, the Croats as well. They and the Muslims cooperated against the Serbs at the very beginning of the war and at the end. In the interval, they conducted horrific battles among themselves. Jasna Hadzimehmedovic recalls how she heard that her soldier fiance had been killed by Croats in the Bosnian town of Vitez. "It was on Christmas Eve" in 1993, she says. "My mother and I were cooking when the phone rang. When they told me, I felt I had aged 50 years." She was then 22. The Hague tribunal charges that Croat militia forces stormed the village of Ahmici, near Vitez, killing everyone on the streets, throwing grenades into cellars where villagers tried to hide, then burning bodies and houses and shelling mosques into rubble. The Croats claim they were responding to massacres by Muslims.