The New York Times, by John F. Burns

By John F. Burns

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nov. 25— What Borislav Herak remembers most vividly about the sunny morning in late June when he and two companions gunned down 10 members of a Muslim family is the small girl, about 10 years old, who tried to hide behind her grandmother as the three Serbian nationalist soldiers opened fire from a distance of about 10 paces.

"We told them not to be afraid, we wouldn't do anything to them, they should just stand in front of the wall," said Mr. Herak, who is 21 years old.

"But it was taken for granted among us that they should be killed. So when somebody said, 'Shoot,' I swung around and pulled the trigger, three times, on automatic fire. I remember the little girl with the red dress hiding behind her granny." Fired From the Hip

As he tells his rambling story now, in a room with potted plants at the Viktor Buban military prison here, Mr. Herak stands up from his steel chair, shuffles into the open part of the room in his green field jacket and laceless black army boots, and demonstrates how he fired from the hip with his Kalashnikov rifle.

With his companions, he emptied a 30-bullet magazine at a family he had found cowering minutes before in the basement of a home at Ahatovici, a Muslim village five miles northwest of the prison.

The particulars given by the young Serb to investigators, and repeated during seven hours of interviews with this reporter, amounted to a chronicle of six months of the savage violence that has characterized the Bosnian war.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Herak and a Serbian married couple, now also under arrest for war crimes, took the wrong road while driving their Volkswagen Golf from the suburban town of Vogosca to Ilidza, in the Serbian-held outskirts of Sarajevo.

At a roadblock, the trio were stopped by a unit of the Bosnian Army defending Sarajevo.

Almost immediately, Mr. Herak began telling investigators of his gruesome experiences as a Serbian fighter, including one incident in which he used a six-inch hunting knife to cut the throats of three captured Muslim men who were Bosnian soldiers.

Until he fled Sarajevo in May and joined the "Serbian volunteers" who have been drafted as auxiliaries to the military forces besieging Sarajevo, Mr. Herak was a primary school graduate who pushed a handcart for a living at a Sarajevo textile company.

29 Murders Charged

Now, under Article 41 of the old Yugoslav criminal code, he faces death by firing squad for offenses that include genocide, mass murder, rape and looting. His trial, expected to begin next month, could make him the first person to be executed legally for crimes committed in Europe's most brutal conflict since 1945.

The indictment lists 29 murders between June and October, including eight rape-murders of Muslim women held prisoner in an abandoned motel and cafe outside Vogosca, seven miles north of Sarajevo. There, Mr. Herak said, he and other Serbian fighters were encouraged to rape women and then take them away to kill them on hilltops and other deserted places.

The indictment also covers the killings of at least 220 other Muslim civilians in which Mr. Herak has confessed to being a witness or a participant. Many of these dead were women and children.

Although Mr. Herak's experiences were limited to a 10-mile stretch of territory immediately north of Sarajevo, his account offered new insights into the ways that tens of thousands of civilian victims of the war have died, most in towns and villages where there have been no independent witnesses.

In addition to the Ahatovici incident -- in which four children under 12, two elderly women and four men were killed -- Mr. Herak described two mass murders of Muslims by Serbian forces in the Sarajevo area.

In the first, in early June, Mr. Herak said, he watched a Serbian unit called the "special investigation group" machine-gunning 120 men, women and children in a field outside Vogosca.

Mr. Herak said dump trucks had been used to transport the bodies to scrub land beside a railway yard at Rajlovac, near Sarajevo, where the bodies were piled in an open pit, doused with gasoline and set afire. Bodies in a Furnace

In another incident with multiple victims, in July, Mr. Herak said, he saw 30 men from Donja Bioca, a Muslim village three miles northwest of Vogosca, shot and incinerated in a furnace at a steel plant at Ilijas, a town north of Vogosca.

Some of the men were alive when they were thrown in to the furnace, he said.

Mr. Herak also described seeing the bodies of 60 Muslim men who he said had been used by Serbian forces as a "human shield" when Bosnian forces were trying in August to drive Serbian forces off Zuc Mountain, a 3,000-foot height outside Vogosca.

'This Skill' Of Cutting Throats

Mr. Herak also recounted being taken to a small farm outside Vogosca where a 65-year-old Serbian volunteer, whom he identified as Risto Pustivuk, had led Mr. Herak and three other young Serbs to a grassy plot one morning in early June and shown them how to wrestle pigs to the ground, hold their heads back with their ears and cut their throats.

Days later, Mr. Herak said, he used what he described as "this skill" to cut the throats of three Muslim men captured fighting for the Bosnian Army near Donja Bioca, the village outside Vogosca.

In effect, Mr. Herak's story was the first account given by a perpetrator to outsiders of how the Serbian nationalist forces have carried out "ethnic cleansing."

This is the policy under which Serbian leaders seeking to carve out much of Bosnia and Herzegovina for an exclusive Serbian enclave have sanctioned the killing of large numbers of Bosnian Muslims and Croats and their forcible eviction from their towns and villages.

This has created a tide of more than 1.6 million refugees that has presented the worst crisis for international relief agencies in Europe since World War II.

Mr. Herak, his head shaven by his captors, frequently used the Serbo-Croatian word "ciscenje," meaning cleansing, to describe his activities as a Serbian fighter, for which he was paid the equivalent of $6.50 a month.

Referring to the killing of the Muslim family at Ahatovici, for instance, he said Serbian commanders had described the Serbian operation in the village as "ciscenje prostora," or the cleansing of the region, and had told the Serbian fighters to leave nobody alive.

"We were told that Ahatovici must be a cleansed Serbian territory, that it was a strategic place between Ilidza and Rajlovac, and that all the Muslims there must be killed," he said.

"We were told that no one must escape, and that all the houses must be burned, so that if anybody did survive, they would have nowhere left to return to. It was an order, and I simply did what I was told."

Either Nonchalant Or Conflicted

Throughout much of his account, which was given partly in the presence of prison officials and partly with nobody from the Bosnian Government or Army present, Mr. Herak appeared almost nonchalant. He described details of the killings without any apparent emotion, and spoke remorsefully only when he was pressed for his feelings.

Then he appeared to be in conflict with himself, saying at one point that "if there was a God, I would not have been caught," and at others that he was haunted by the recurring images of the people he had killed.

"All these things have fried my conscience," he said.

But even the threat of execution seemed not to hold his attention for long. "I am sure that I am guilty, and even if I am sorry, I will be executed," he said at one point. "They will stand me in front of a wall and shoot me."

Later, he said he would like to be exchanged for Muslim prisoners held by the Serbian forces. On another occasion, he suggested that he should be freed to fight on the Bosnian side.

"I don't suppose that's possible," he said. "But if it's possible, I'd like it."

Looking pallid, with sunken eyes and with fingernails so deeply bitten that some have virtually disappeared, Mr. Herak said he was haunted at night by the recollection of some of his victims, in particular the three Muslim men whose throats he had cut.

"I have pictures in my mind of many things I did, and they return every night," he said. "I sleep, I wake up in a sweat, I sleep again, I wake up and smoke, and Osman is always there. I have dreamed at least 10 times of Osman saying: 'Please don't kill me. I have a wife and two small children.' " His Attention To Detail Is Keen

But mostly, his account was offered in a matter-of-fact manner, and always with a keen attention to detail. As he shifted between one killing and another, and between rapes, the young Serb gave the names of many of his victims. He described where they were killed, what they were wearing, and what they said immediately before they died.

In hours of talking he never changed a detail. He fell silent, a few times, only when pressed for his feelings.

When asked what he would have said to the mother of one girl he raped and killed, he replied, "Nothing."

Asked repeatedly if he had been put under pressure to talk, or promised a lighter sentence or relief from harsh treatment for confessing, he said he had not.

At one point, when this reporter asked to see his upper body, he pulled up his shirt to show that he had not been bruised. But he appeared deeply frightened, and asked after one long session if a visitor would seek the prison governor's assurance that the guards, mostly Muslims, would not beat him once he had finished telling his story.

The governor, Besim Muderizovic, gave assurances that he would not be harmed.

According to investigators, much of what Mr. Herak has told them has been echoed by the Serbian couple who were with him in the car when he was arrested.

The second man in the car, Sreten Damjanovic, 31, is said to have been a companion of Mr. Herak's at many of the killings. Afterinvestigators confronted him with statements by Mr. Herak and Mr. Damjanovic's wife, Nada, 46, implicating him in the Ahatovici killings, Mr. Damjanovic is said to have replied: "Is that what he said? If you put me in a cell with him, I'll kill him."

His Father Believes The Tales of Murder

Among those who appear satisfied that Mr. Herak is telling the truth is his father, Sretko Herak, a welding technician who is one of about 50,000 Serbs who have remained in Sarajevo during the siege.

Milica Herak, his wife, also a Serb, was visiting Belgrade, the Serbian capital, when Serbian forces surrounded Sarajevo in April, and Borislav Herak's decision in late May to flee across a bridge in central Sarajevo into the Serbian-held district of Vraca left the older Mr. Herak, who is 55, alone.

When this reporter arrived at the two-story home in the Pofalici district, Sretko Herak invited him in, then quickly burst into tears.

Referring to a tape-recorded confession by his son played on Sarajevo television on Tuesday night, Mr. Herak said: "I could see that he was frightened, but I believe he was telling the truth. Now I am ashamed to look people in the face because my son has thrown dirt on his family."

Saying his son had a history of poor grades in school, erratic behavior as a conscript in the Yugoslav Navy and heavy drinking accompanied by threats of physical harm to his father, Sretko Herak said: "I would be happier if he had simply killed me, and gone to prison for it. Now, I am alive and tortured by what my boy has done to innocent people."

Like many residential districts in Sarajevo, the Pofalici neighborhood where Borislav Herak grew up, on a hillside that has been heavily pounded by Serbian guns, is a mixed community of Serbs, Croats and Muslims, and residents say there have never been nationalist frictions.

Tracing his family's history, the older Mr. Herak noted that his mother was a Croat and that his daughter, Ljubinka, who is 30, is married to a Muslim, Nezad Jankovic, who is a taxi driver fighting in the Bosnian forces. The couple have a daughter, Indijana, who is 7 and is and now living with her mother in Skopje, capital of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

Killer Speaks Warmly of Muslims

Borislav Herak, during two interviews at the prison, spoke with warmth of Muslims, in particular of Mr. Jankovic, his brother-in-law, whom he described as exceptionally kind and a good husband to his sister.

Speaking of the couple's daughter, Indijana, who like tens of thousands of people in Sarajevo has a combination of Serb, Muslim and Croat forebears, he said, "I love her more than anything else in my life, Indijana."

Mr. Herak said he had had nothing but good relations with Muslim neighbors in Pofalici. They had invited the Herak family into their homes for Bajram, the principal Muslim festival here, and had been invited each year into the Herak home to celebrate the Serbian Orthodox Christmas.

"They helped me, Muslims," he said. "They were very good to me as people. Everywhere I went, Muslims helped me. They are a very correct people."

But Mr. Herak said that after he went to the bridge across the Miljacka River in late May, carrying a loaf of bread as a pre-arranged signal to Serbian fighters waiting for him on the other side, he began to get a different view of Muslims.

From Serbian radio and television and in gatherings with other Serbian fighters, particularly the older generation steeped in Serbian folklore going back to defeats by the Ottoman Turks in the Middle Ages, he said, he learned that Muslims posed a threat to Serbs.

Among other things, he said, Serbian political leaders and commanders told fighters that Muslims, who accounted for 44 percent of Bosnia's prewar population of 4.4 million, were planning to declare "an Islamic republic" in Bosnia, which became independent of Yugoslavia under a Muslim-led Government in April, just as the Sarajevo siege began.

According to these accounts, Mr. Herak said, Muslims would also require Serbian children to wear Muslim clothing. "We were told that we would have to cleanse our whole population of Muslims," he said. "That's what we have been told. That's why it has been necessary to do all this."

Massacre Began With Looting

The young fighter said that he had also been motivated by the urge to have things he never had before the war, including women and items like television sets and videos and foreign currency that Serbian fighters were encouraged to loot from Muslims' homes.

He said the Ahatovici killings, when 10 members of one family were shot by Mr. Herak and his companions, began as the three men entered the house, heard voices in the basement and went downstairs to demand valuables.

He said one of the two elderly women was sitting in a chair, and told him, "Sonny, we don't have anything."

Mr. Herak continued: "So then I hit the old granny on the head with my rifle, and she got up and pulled a wardrobe away from the wall, and there underneath it was what we were looking for."

He said he and his two companions -- whom he identified as Rade Vljes, 47, a welder, and his son Dragan Viljes, 19 -- had taken from the family 500 German marks, about $320, plus a collection of gold bracelets, chains, earrings and rings.

Mr. Herak said the Muslims had not pleaded for their lives as they were ordered up the basement stairs and outside, although the widespread killings of Muslim civilians by Serbian fighters were well known in Bosnia by late June.

The only exception, he said, was Osman, one of the three Muslim men whose throats he cut with his hunting knife. He said the other Muslim soldiers, Ahmed and Ziad, had said nothing as they were tackled to the ground and had their feet held by other fighters while Mr. Herak cut their throats.

"It was just a short cut, and they were dead immediately, just like the pigs," Mr. Herak said, demonstrating his technique in the prison office by kneeling on one knee, pulling his right hand back in a replay of the movement needed to expose his victims' necks, and making a quick, imaginary cut with his left hand. Only One Pleaded For His Life

"But Osman was different," he said. "He pleaded for his life at the very last moment. But it made no difference. He was dead in two seconds."

One group that had no opportunity to know what the Serbian fighters planned for them was a working party of five Muslim men whom the fighters took from a "prison" for Muslim civilians near Vogosca and drove up Zuc Mountain to dig trenches for the Serbian forces.

Mr. Herak said that his companion that day, in July, was a Serbian "volunteer" named Dragoljub, and that Dragoljub had said: "These guys should be killed. They're working poorly. They're not making any effort."

Mr. Herak continued: "They were standing with their backs to me, so I opened fire. They didn't say anything; it was so fast. Two, three seconds, they were dead."

Often Mr. Herak's account ran back to the Sonja cafe, a motel and restaurant complex outside Vogosca on the main road north from Sarajevo to Zagreb, the Croatian capital.

Mr. Herak said the "commander" of the prison for Muslim women established in the motel was a Serbian fighter named Miro Vukovic, who was a loyalist of a ultranationalist Serbian paramilitary group headed by Vojislav Seselj, a leading politician in Serbia. He said Mr. Vukovic had established "a system" for the Serbian fighters raping and killing the women.

"It was always the same," Mr. Herak said, describing how he and his companions were encouraged to go to the motel by Serbian commanders who told them that raping Muslim women was "good for raising the fighters' morale." Rapist Remembers Victims' Names

Mr. Herak identified the women he had attacked -- Emina, Sabina, Amela and Fatima among others, the youngest of them teen-agers, the oldest about 35 -- and said Mr. Vukovic, the "prison commander," had told them: "You can do with the women what you like. You can take them away from here -- we don't have enough food for them anyway -- and don't bring them back."

Mr. Herak said this was understood to mean that the women should be killed. He described how he and a companion had attacked Fatima, whom he described as "a nice woman, about 30 years old," in a room at the motel, and then taken her at gunpoint in their car to Zuc Mountain.

"We stopped by a small bridge, and I told her to get out. She walked about three meters away from the car, with her back to me, and I just shot her, I think in the upper back or the back of the head," he said, showing how he fired from the hip, once more without taking aim. "I went to her, just to be sure that she was dead."

Mr. Herak said some of the women had been left by the roadside, while others had been dragged into bushes to hide them from the Serbian military police, who he said were feared among the Serbian fighters.

He said that he went to the motel once every three or four days, and that although Serbian fighters routinely took the women they raped away and killed them, there were always more women arriving. "It was never a problem," he said. "You just picked up a key and went to a room."

Mr. Herak's account of the rapes was among the tape-recorded sequences shown on Sarajevo television.

His father, showing visitors through the younger Mr. Herak's room at the family home on Drinska Street, seemed to shift from grief to something closer to disgust as he opened cupboards and showed piles of pornographic magazines and empty liquor bottles.

"I told Boro many times, 'Never pick up a gun,' " Mr. Herak said. "But he didn't listen. He just said, 'That's okay, old man, you just stay here and wait for the Serbian shells to kill you.' "

By John F. Burns

ZVORNIK, Bosnia and Herzegovina, May 19— When Serbian gunmen go door to door, pulling Muslim Slavs from their homes at gunpoint and herding them aboard cattle trucks, they call it "ethnic purification."

But another name for what the Serbs are doing in this deserted, bullet- and shell-scarred town in the Alpine hills of eastern Bosnia, and in communities elsewhere in this disintegrating republic, is the revision of history.

For more than 500 years, since Turkish conquerors swept up the Drina River valley and overthrew the medieval Serbian potentate whose ruined fortress looks down from Zvornik's wooded heights, this has been a place where Serbs, Muslim Slavs and Croats have lived side by side.

An End to Coexistence

But not for much longer in Zvornik, if it is left to the slouch-postured Serbian militiamen who now control the town. At lunchtime on Tuesday, another truck appeared in the sinuous back streets. In minutes, militiamen in camouflaged fatigues press-ganged more Muslim men aboard, to join the wave of at least 670,000 refugees already swamping the "heartbreak hotels," as the victims of Bosnia's savage civil war call the tent camps, school gymnasiums and parks that serve as temporary quarters for many of the homeless.

At least 5,000 of the refugees, perhaps twice as many, are Muslims from Zvornik, a town with a 60 percent Muslim majority that only had about 15,000 residents when the deportations began six weeks ago.

How many Muslims have been driven from all of eastern Bosnia, a region about 50 miles wide and about 125 miles deep, is unclear, but what is certain is that the Serb terror tactics have been aimed at making a Serb stronghold of a region where 78 percent of a population of about 450,000 people were Muslims, and only 10 percent Serbs, at the time of the 1991 census.

Like the other refugees across Bosnia, most of those driven from Zvornik left with only a few cherished belongings, scrambling aboard trucks and buses with vacuum cleaners, children's tricycles, and plastic bags of clothing. Many have had to walk for days across deeply forested mountains, sleeping in the open with small children and pooling what little cash they had to buy food.

Major Refugee Crisis

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has described it as Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II, and one of the worst anywhere in decades.

"I saw the people crying," one old Muslim said, describing the latest expulsions from Zvornik. Western reporters were kept from witnessing the roundup by Serbian soldiers at a roadblock on the eastern side of the Drina.

The soldiers said that they had been told to let no outsiders cross from Serbia into Bosnia at Zvornik from 1 P.M. to 2:30 P.M., the exact period, the Zvornik Muslims said later, when the Muslims were being loaded onto the truck.

Afterward, in their home in Zvornik, a Muslim family told of the sudden departure of Serbs from the town in the days before the evening of April 8, when Serbian militia units opened fire on the town's residential areas from across the Drina with tank cannon, mortars and other weapons; of how Serbian militiamen swept into the town at dawn, rounded up Muslims, and killed groups of them, including at least 50 in one neighborhood near the town center; of how thousands of Muslims had to choose between trying to protect their homes without being killed or volunteering to join other Muslims being driven from the town. Reports of Mass Burials

Little of what they said could be independently verified, not even the accounts of the bulldozed mounds in a gravel pit by the Drina where hundreds of victims of the bombardment and executions were said by the Muslims to have been buried in the days after April 9. When militiamen spotted two Western reporters talking to local Serbs near the police headquarters, the reporters were escorted back across the Drina into Serbia and told not to come back.

Despite the lack of corroboration, there was much that suggested that the Muslims were not exaggerating. For one thing, while the Muslims seemed deeply frightened, their stories of actions against them by Serb militias were told with a striking absence of animosity against Serbs in general. Indeed many insisted on recounting the kindnesses shown toward them by individual Serb neighbors.

Moreover, dozens of Western relief workers and reporters who have visited refugee centers farther west in Bosnia, and who have spoken to Muslim refugees from towns and villages along the Drina Valley, have been told similar tales of summary executions, of homes looted and burned, of cattle trucks carrying men, women and children away.

While forced deportations have also been carried out by Muslim Slav and Croatian militias, adding thousands of Serbs to the refugee tide, the process appears to have been carried out more systematically, and on a wider scale, by the Serbs.

International Condemnation

Their actions, and Serbia's support for them, have been condemned by the United States, the United Nations Security Council, the European Community, and with increasing anger by Muslim nations around the world, whose leaders, like President Turgut Ozal of Turkey, have argued for international military intervention of the kind that the United Nations authorized after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

But so far, little has been done, apart from the decision last week by the United States and the 12-nation European Community to withdraw their ambassadors from Yugoslavia, now composed only of Serbia and Montenegro.

The status of the Bosnian Muslims, who account for 44 percent of Bosnia and Herzegovina's 4.4 million people, took a turn for the worse on March 1, when Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian President, followed the lead of Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia in declaring Bosnia's secession from Yugoslavia.

While Serbian leaders in the republic continued to go through the motions of negotiating with other groups for the creation of an independent Bosnia composed of ethnic "cantons," Serbia, the Yugoslav Army and Serbian militias in Bosnia began putting a plan into effect to carve up Bosnia on ethnic lines, with about two-thirds of the republic's territory to be seized for the Serbs. Offensive by Serbian Forces

The Serbs worked from an ethnic map. With arms and ammunition supplied by the army, and in many cases with the army fighting alongside them, Serbian militias seized a wide corridor of eastern Bosnia adjacent to Serbia, including towns with large Muslim populations like Bijeljina, Zvornik, Bratunac, Vlasenica, Visegrad, Gorazde, and Foca.

To this, they planned to add a northern corridor of Bosnia that would connect Serbia to Serb-held areas of Croatia, and to Serbian strongholds in northwestern parts of the republic around Bihac. In the southern Herzegovina region, they fought for Muslim towns like Mostar, apparently hoping to create another corridor connecting to southern Serbia and Montenegro.

In late March, Zvornik seemed like a quiet, untroubled town. At a flea market beside the rushing, blue-green waters of the Drina, Muslim vendors in filigreed skullcaps set up rickety tables side by side with the town's Serbian and Croatian entrepreneurs, selling the bric-a-brac of eastern Europe, from Czechoslovak-made bicycle pumps to Polish combs. For travelers driving to Sarajevo, Zvornik seemed like a symbol of what Bosnia could be if ethnic militants could be pushed to the sidelines and the fledgling nation's future built around the goodwill that seemed evident on that sunny, late winter's day. Old Ideas of Harmony

The notion of harmony on the Drina has deep roots in the psyche of Yugoslavia, whose most celebrated 20th-century writer, Ivo Andric, wrote a novel, "Bridge on the Drina," that helped him win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961.

The book is centered on Visegrad, and the 16th-century stone bridge across the river is a metaphor for the interwoven cultures, Serbian, Croatian and Turkish, Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic and Muslim, that have made the town. In the Serbian offensive, Visegrad was one of the first towns to be seized, and its Muslims, like Zvornik's, are now mostly in refugee camps.

Killings of Civilians

The Muslims in Zvornik built barricades, but their situation was strategically hopeless. Since Roman times, when the narrow gorge between what is now Serbia and Bosnia was first spanned by a bridge, Zvornik has been a prime target for invading armies.

The Romans, the Turks, the Austro-Hungarian forces in World War I, and the Germans in World War II, all seized the town. The Serbs completed the job in barely 12 hours. But their objective, more than occupation, was expulsion of the town's Muslim majority.

First, there was terror. One man in his 60's described how he watched the town's veterinarian, a Muslim, being machine-gunned along with other Muslims in front of the veterinarian's wife and daughter.

The man said that he had counted at least 50 bodies of Muslims in the gardens of homes back from Zvornik's main street, where four-story homes with steep Alpine roofs crowd against the towering escarpment of Vratolomac, the "neck-breaking hill" that overlooks the town.

The man said that one of the dead was a 17-year-old Serb girl whose throat had been cut. "She was slaughtered just because she asked them not to do anything to the Muslims," he said.

The man said he had been led to his home by a young militiaman of about 25. But once inside, the militiaman spared him. "He said, 'O.K., I have orders to shoot you, but I'm not going to do it, I'm going to shoot out of the window,' " the man said.

Sympathy From Serbs

Other Muslims said that Serbian friends had been sympathetic, but were forbidden to help them overtly. "If they talk to us, they take them to the police station and question them," one Muslim woman said. But to many Serbs, what happened seems to be considered a triumph. As one militia jeep passed down the main street, a group of children held three fingers aloft, an Orthodox symbol that has become the equivalent of a 'V' for victory salute among the Bosnian Serbs.

Immediately after the town was seized, most Muslims were dismissed from their jobs in the town's hospital, at a timber mill, and at the aluminum fabricating plant that is the principal employer, the Muslims said. One man in his 40's produced a neatly folded sheet of white paper, entitled "Decision on the Abrogation of Work Contract", informing him that he had been sacked from his his job of 20 years for failing to turn up on April 9, when the killing was continuing.

"Anybody who approached the industrial zone that day, they started to shoot," the man said. "Those who couldn't go to work were fired."

Rampage of Looting

The Muslims who remain say they are trapped. Most have had their cars stolen, part of a rampage that saw militiamen going house to house, taking television sets, video recorders, skis, anything portable.

One man showed a pink identity card, issued by the militiamen and bearing the stamp of the self-proclaimed Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he said forbade him, and other Muslims, to travel more than 10 miles from Zvornik. "They want a few of us here as hostages, in case the Muslims attack," he said. A neighbor said she had returned from Belgrade in the hope of persuading a "commission" established by the Serbs to re-distribute homes to Serbs not to confiscate hers.

Eventually, the Serbs apparently intend to re-populate Zvornik with Serbian refugees from elsewhere in Bosnia, but for now it is a ghost town. Along the main street, once lively with cafes and grocery stores, all is now silent, with storefront after storefront shattered by bullets and shelves emptied by looters.

At a hairdresser's, one of the few businesses still operating, a Serb named Zdrako Stefanovic traced what he said was a history of persecution of Zvornik's Serbs, from the Turkish conquest in 1460 A.D. to the arrest, deportation and execution of his father by Croatian fascists in World War II. From these experiences, he said, Serbs had learned never again to expose themselves to domination by another ethnic group.

Another Serb, Drago Djukanovic, agreed. "Let the Muslims go to their own areas of Bosnia," he said. "They can live peacefully there. But we are not going to live with them here."

By John F. Burns

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, May 31— When the Serbian Orthodox priests lifted the top off Predrag Marjanovic's coffin for his family's last farewells today, his grandmother leaned over, moved the black scarf from his face and kissed him.

"Your brothers who survive you will avenge you!" she said, her anguished voice rising above the wailing of the dead man's mother and sister.

Around them, in the caramel-colored church in the hills above this besieged city, Serbian men in camouflage fatigues with pistols, knives and grenades strapped to their belts wept for their comrade, a 27-year-old Serbian policeman. He died on Friday when a sniper in Sarajevo shot him in the back as he pulled his pajamas from a clothesline.

After their farewells, the mourners stepped out into the drizzle and vowed to keep fighting until Sarajevo was "liberated" from the Croats and Muslim Slavs who control much of the city.

"If this land is not going to be Serbian, it will be nobody's," said a 30-year-old Serbian policeman, also named Predrag, who gave only his first name.

A day after the United Nations Security Council imposed sweeping sanctions on Serbia and identified it as the principal aggressor in Bosnia and Herzegovina's civil war, the mood among the ethnic Serbian forces encircling Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, was defiant, and at times apocalyptic.

In their vows to keep fighting, to avenge lost comrades and to capture Sarajevo -- or at least to carve out Serbian enclaves that can be governed as part of an autonomous Serbian republic -- the fighters offer little hope that they will yield at any time soon to international pressure.

On the Serbian front lines, along the slopes of the 6,500-foot mountains that cradle Sarajevo, the mood was one of a people who consider themselves maligned, above all by the United States, which led the drive for sanctions.

Sometimes in anger, sometimes in what seemed like despair, officers and men alike assailed American reporters entering Sarajevo for what they said were misleading Western news accounts that had helped push the United Nations into the embargo on trade, oil, civil aviation and sports.

At the funeral, at paramilitary checkpoints along the rutted mountain roads that are the Serbs' supply lines, and at military barracks on Sarajevo's outskirts where Serbian commanders direct their operations, the Serbs insisted that atrocities attributed to their forces -- including a mortar attack on a bread line in the center of Sarajevo in which at least 20 people died -- were "provocations" by Muslim Slav units seeking to push the world into punitive actions against Serbia. Fear of Extinction

The Serbs also represented themselves as men fighting to save their historic foothold in Sarajevo against the Muslim-dominated Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which they said was committed to a program of Islamic fundamentalism, and ultimately to the extinction of the Serbian Orthodox Church and other aspects of Serbian culture that have been rooted here since Sarajevo in its present form was founded 535 years ago.

Finally, the Serbs said, they were fighting to save their families and fellow military men who have been trapped in Sarajevo by the fighting.

As mortar and machine-gun fire broke the stillness outside his office, Col. Tomislav Sipcic of the newly formed army of the so-called Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was preoccupied with the plight of Serbs trapped in Sarajevo. At intervals during the evening, the granite faced officer at the Lukavica barracks in Sarajevo's outskirts picked up a telephone on his candle-lit desk to speak with a Croatian commander of the opposing Muslim-Slav and Croatian forces in Sarajevo.

Until 12 years ago, Colonel Sipcic, who is 50 years old, was an officer in the Yugoslav Army It has transferred at least 55,000 troops to the new army after the Serbian Government, under pressure to respect Bosnia and Herzegovina's independent status, ordered Yugoslav forces to withdraw. Now, in addition to maintaining a blockade on Sarajevo, the Colonel's tasks include bargaining with the Croatian commander, Col. Stjepan Siber, over 734 Serbs who are trapped in the Marshal Tito barracks in the heart of Sarajevo.

For more than two months, the Serbs, who include 486 women and children and 248 officers and teen-age military cadets, have been besieged in the barracks by Croatian and Muslim Slav forces. Inside the huge military encampment, covering the equivalent of 10 city blocks, the Serbs are trapped without electrical power or fresh food, and their fate has become intertwined with that of Sarajevo itself. In effect, they have become hostages to the heavy bombardment of the city by Serbian artillery, mortar and rocket batteries in the surrounding hills.

Tonight, in one of the curious human twists to the Sarajevo battle, Colonel Sipcic agreed to allow a Muslim Slav chess team safe passage on their way to the World Chess Olympiad in the Philippines if Colonel Siber, a former army colleague, held to an agreement to allow the evacuation of the Marshal Tito barracks on Monday.

Similar agreements have been made and broken at the last moment, raising fears of a massacre if the walls of the barracks should be breached.

But if ties forged in the old Yugoslavia still count for something among military officers, much else about Sarajevo attests to the rupturing of human bonds and the resurgence of the ethnic and religious hatreds of the past. Many of the Serbian fighters described their Muslim foes as lazy, and as under the spell of Alija Izetbegovic, the President of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a man they described as a Muslim extremist.

"What they didn't succeed in achieving 500 years ago they want now," said Grujo Sudzum, a 36-year-old Serbian mechanic serving as a military volunteer, referring to the Turkish drive into Europe in the 15th century.

As dusk settled over the low hills separating the Lucavica barracks, Mr. Sudzum was surrounded by a group of Serbian volunteers. Asked if they would agree to United Nations demands that they stop fighting if it meant the end of their bid for a Serbian republic within Bosnia, they replied in a chorus: "Never!"

One man exclaimed: "I lost my house!" Another man said he had lost contact with his wife and three children in Pofalici, a district where, the fighters said, Muslim Slav militiamen had killed at least 70 civilians 15 days ago, burning some alive in their homes.

In the village of Pale, 10 miles from Sarajevo, the funeral of Mr. Marjanovic left no doubt about the bitterness stirred by the fighting. After Serbian priests in black and golden vestments had performed a liturgy over the coffin, and mourners with lighted candles had filed under the oil-painted icons to kiss the dead policeman, Nedeljko Rasevic, a 41-year-old hotel manager now serving as a military volunteer, blamed President Bush for what he said was the United Nations' victimization of the Serbs.

"If Mr. Bush was here he wouldn't do such things to our people," Mr. Rasevic said. "He should come here to see the truth. He should come here and learn about the eight people that the Muslims took to a school basement in Sarajevo and burned alive. We are burying our people all the time."

By John F. Burns

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 7— As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding thunderously into buildings all around, a disheveled, stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni's Adagio.

There were only two people to hear him, and both fled, dodging from doorway to doorway, before the performance ended.

Each day at 4 P.M., the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, walks to the same spot on the pedestrian mall for a concert in honor of Sarajevo's dead.

The spot he has chosen is outside the bakery where several high-explosive rounds struck a bread line 12 days ago, killing 22 people and wounding more than 100. If he holds to his plan, there will be 22 performances before his gesture has run its course.

Two months into a civil war that turns more murderous by the day, Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a skeleton of the thriving, accomplished city it was. It is a wasteland of blasted mosques, churches and museums; of fire-gutted office towers, hotels and sports stadiums, and of hospitals, music schools and libraries punctured by rockets, mortars and artillery shells.

Parks have been pressed into service as emergency cemeteries, and the pathetic lines of graves march ever farther up the hillsides toward the gun emplacements.

What is happening here, in a European city that escaped two World Wars with only minor damage, is hard to grasp for many of those enduring it.

It is a disaster of such magnitude, and of such seeming disconnectedness from any achievable military or political goals, that those who take shelter for days in basement bunkers, emerging briefly into daylight for fresh supplies of bread and water, exhaust themselves trying to make sense of it.

Many, like Mr. Smailovic, who played the cello for the Sarajevo Opera, reach for an anchor amid the chaos by doing something, however small, that carries them back to the stable, reasoned life they led before.

Mr. Smailovic, 36 years old, spoke over the blasts of the shells that have poured down on the city unremittingly for the last 48 hours. The barrages by the Serbian forces seem to be a paroxysm of fury at their failure to capture the city after weeks of dumping thousands of tons of high explosives from the hillsides.

He could have been speaking for all the survivors trapped here, in defiance of the Serbian nationalists' insistence that only the ethnic partitioning of the city, and of the republic, can bring them security.

"My mother is a Muslim and my father is a Muslim," Mr. Smailovic said, "but I don't care. I am a Sarajevan, I am a cosmopolitan, I am a pacifist." Then he added: "I am nothing special, I am a musician, I am part of the town. Like everyone else, I do what I can."

In Sarajevo, as in many cities, towns and villages across this former Yugoslav republic, Serbs, Muslims and Croats, the third major ethnic group in the population of 4.4 million, have lived for centuries side by side, so much so that their cultures, families and life styles have grown into each other -- creating a society of striking depth and variety.

Symbol of Civility Now Symbol of Pain

They have done so in a landscape that is one of the most beautiful in Europe, a place of Alpine mountains and blue-green rivers, of terra cotta-roofed houses that cling to precipitous hillsides, of white stone mosques with green copper domes and pencil-slim minarets.

Sarajevo, in a narrow valley bordered on all sides by mountains, has long been the symbol of this richly textured life, enchanting generations of travelers since the present city was established by a Turkish sultan in 1462.

Now it is a symbol of another kind -- of a place where Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and other religious and ethnic minorities, including Albanians and a tiny population of Jews, suffer together. They endure the gunfire of Serbian nationalists who believe that the independent nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina proclaimed on March 2, and led by Muslims and Croats, will dominate and eventually persecute Serbs.

From this conviction -- met with increasing ferocity in many parts of the republic by Muslims and Croats, some of whom have adopted tactics as brutal as those of the Serbs -- has grown the war that is draining the life from Sarajevo.

The conflict here had small beginnings early in April, when decisions by the European Community and the United States to recognize the new nation led to barricades being thrown up around the city by rival ethnic militias.

Early in May, it got out of control after Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim who is President of the new republic, was kidnapped by the Serbian forces, and Muslim and Croatian troops retaliated by ambushing a convoy of the Serbian-led Yugoslav Army as it evacuated an army headquarters in the city.

The President, who was released in exchange for guarantees of safe passage for the convoy, was out on Marshal Tito Street in the center of Sarajevo this afternoon. He walked gingerly around piles of broken glass and rubble from the shattered facades of apartment buildings built during the time before World War I when Sarajevo was an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The 67-year-old leader, a lawyer and economist who spent nearly 10 years in prison under Yugoslavia's Communist rulers for his writings on Muslim beliefs, sought to reassure scattered groups of people he met along the way. But he made no effort to hide his own anxiety after weeks of heavy shelling.

"Are you scared?" he asked a group of militiamen standing guard with Kalashnikov automatic rifles under an archway leading into the Solomon Palace, a six-story apartment building that was once home to some of the city's leading Jews, many of whom died in the Nazi terror.

"A little," one militiaman replied, shifting nervously in a denim jacket embroidered with the fleur-de-lis badge that is the emblem of the new republic.

"I am afraid too," replied Mr. Izetbegovic, who has spent long periods in a basement bunker in a nearby Government building. "But we must hold out."

For many here, that has become a prospect of appalling bleakness. Although the United Nations on Friday reached the outline of an agreement to take control of Butmir Airport, on the city's outskirts, from the Serbian forces and to open a corridor into town, there is little confidence here that the Serbs will carry it out.

By lifting the siege, the Serbs would effectively acknowledge that they have lost the city, many in Saravejo believe. Already, all but a few of Sarajevo's suburbs are controlled by Bosnian territorial forces made up of Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

But if relief supplies do not arrive soon, desperation may turn to catastrophe. Only a handful of Government services still operate, and those in skeletal state. No one seems to know how many people remain, but it appears to be at least half the city's prewar population of 560,000 -- possibly many more.

Food and Hope Are Running Low

The Serbian nationalist forces allow no food to pass through their roadblocks on the periphery of town, and supplies that have been sneaked past their gun positions on the hills have been minimal. Most families have only loaves of bread baked by the single bakery that continues to function, using reserve supplies of flour from silos that are in a part of town under Mr. Izetbegovic's control.

To this, some families have added a thin gruel made of water and nettles taken from the lower slopes of the surrounding hills. With inventive cooking, and private supplies of flour, Sarajevans produce the likes of French bread and a sugared Turkish cake called kevlici.

But no one outside the Government knows how long the flour supplies might hold out, and fear of starvation is widespread. When two Western reporters entered the city on Friday, one of the first people they encountered was a professor of biophysics from the medical faculty of Sarajevo University, Dr. Hamid Pasic.

"I am hungry!" he said. "I am 76 years old, I am a professor, and I am hungry!"

Those who venture out for food do so at great risk. Although some of the gunnery appears to be aimed at military targets, most of the rounds land in densely populated parts of the city. The sections of town taking the worst punishment include the central district and Bascarsija, an old quarter of mosques, narrow alleyways and wooden-front workshops and boutiques.

The toll has risen rapidly, particularly this weekend, when the Serbian gunners began their most merciless barrage. Every minute or two, with only a few pauses, shells slammed into apartment buildings and the remnants of commercial districts, each volley hitting with a blast that could be heard miles away.

At night, the skyline was a facsimile of Baghdad during the gulf war -- with gunners' flares lighting the high-rises of the city center in silhouette, and tracer fire skipping across the sky.

From a vantage point in the old town, fires blazed at every point of the compass, some of them huge conflagrations that burned for hours. Wisdom and Tears Of a Barkeeper

The number of dead and wounded was another unknown, but gravediggers were hard pressed to keep up with the new bodies arriving by the hour.

At Kovlaci Park above Bascarsija, 185 new graves, each with a coffin-shaped wooden marker bearing the Muslim emblems of a star and a crescent moon, lay row upon row on the hillside. The graves were piles of freshly turned earth beneath clusters of wild roses, carnations and violets.

Shells hitting the hillside drove a steam-shovel operator who was digging the graves into the cover of a ridge abutment. While he took shelter there, two middle-aged women carrying plastic bags of bread were hit by a new blast. Both were killed.

For Kemal Aljevic, the 45-year-old owner of a bar in Bascarsija called Alf, after the American television puppet character, the sight of the Kovlaci graves was too much. With tears streaming down his cheeks, Mr. Aljevic said that the Serbian gunners appeared to be repeating the destruction of Vukovar, the Croatian town of 45,000 that was reduced to rubble by artillery fire last year.

"This will be three times worse than Vukovar," he said.

As in Vukovar, the Serbs seem to use the heaviest weapons of the Yugoslav Army, which formally withdrew from Bosnia and Herzegovina three weeks ago and turned at least 55,000 men over to a new force of Bosnia's ethnic Serbs.

One of two Sarajevo newspapers still being produced, Oslobodenje, quoted Yugoslav Army officers who had defected to the Bosnians as saying that weapons being used in the barrage included 155-millimeter howitzers, 120-millimeter mortars, 104-millimeter tank cannon and 132-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers. The paper said a total of 4,000 tons of high explosives had been fired into the city.

Some of the artillery shells are coming from a former Yugoslav Army barracks at Hampjesic, 20 miles east of Sarajevo, the officers reportedly added.

Houses of Worship Become Targets

The destruction has reached every quarter of Sarajevo, and almost every landmark. Fifty of the city's 80 mosques have been damaged or destroyed, including the oldest in the Balkans, Tabacki Mesdid, which dates to 1450. The Morica Han, a 15th-century Turkish inn stop for caravans, and the Islamic Theological Faculty, also from the 15th century, were damaged.

The main synagogue and the Roman Catholic cathedral have been hit, though only lightly damaged. The main broadcasting center and its transmitter have been repeatedly shelled; repairs at feverish speed have kept the radio and television stations on the air.

The Serbian nationalists seem to have taken little care to avoid buildings of historic importance to the ethnic Serbs who live here, 38 percent of the city's population before the fighting.

One building was extensively damaged by a shell that pierced its glass dome. It was the National Library, formerly the city hall, where in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary attended a reception minutes before he and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated by a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. Half a mile away, at the site of the assassination, the museum dedicated to Mr. Princip has now been destroyed.

The main Serbian Orthodox church in the city center has also been extensively damaged.

Sites linked to the 1984 Olympics have come under fire, too. Both cupolas have been destroyed atop the former United States Consulate building, a neo-classical structure on a rise above the city center, which served as the Olympic museum. Its roof was penetrated by a shell, and all its windows were shattered.

The hospitals are packed with the wounded, many with amputated limbs from shrapnel blasts. Doctors report an unusually high incidence of heart attacks and of psychological distress.

With gasoline unavailable, many of the doctors walk miles to work through streets where every intersection offers clear sightlines to snipers in the hills. Along the way, hundreds of cars, buses and trams lie destroyed, many of them burned-out hulks.

A lung specialist who walks back from the Vrazova Health Center every day spends her nights in a shopping-center storage room in the city's old quarter with her husband, a cardiologist.

With them, on mattresses on the floor, are a taxi driver, dentist, fireman, electrical engineer, waiter and computer scientist, together with their families -- a cross-section of Sarajevo life, pressed together as they rarely were before the fighting. Amid occasional tears, there are moments of joy over chess games, crossword puzzles and surprise meetings with old friends from other parts of town.

"You're alive!" a professor exclaimed to another who appeared in a shopping arcade on Saturday night, hugging him tightly for a full minute as both wept.

On a radio broadcast that was frequently drowned out by exploding shells, an announcer urged people to turn up the volume on the station's Bosnian patriotic songs and Beatles music. "We cannot kill these maniacs with guns," he said, "so let's kill them with love and music."

Escape Mechanisms: Music and Disbelief

In an apartment nearby, with only a candle burning to deny the gunners a target, the 16-year-old daughter of a Muslim electrical engineer and his architect wife, Meliha Dzirlo, lingered at a piano into the small hours playing Beethoven's "Pathetique" Sonata and a polonaise by Chopin.

Everywhere, when they were not arranging forays for food or water or exchanging names of those killed or wounded, people appealed for help from the outside world. After listening to a shortwave-radio account of the United Nations plans for relief convoys, Asim Hadzic, a 30-year-old Muslim who is a food-company salesman, shook his head.

"It would be a good start but it isn't enough," he said. "We want military intervention."

The doctor who walks every day to the Vrazova Clinic, a Muslim who, fearing for her house, asked not to be identified, took a wider view.

"I can't believe this is all real," she said, gesturing toward a pile of rubble from an apartment building. "Here we are on the eve of the 21st century -- in Europe, in a beautiful city and a country that offered people every possibility of a good life. How can such a thing happen? And how can a so-called civilized world allow it to continue?"

By John F. Burns

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, June 22— Shortly before 11 A.M. today, the rocket-blasted stretch of Marshal Tito Street in the center of what was once Sarajevo's main shopping district returned briefly to something like its old self. 

No shells from Serbian gun positions on the surrounding hillsides had fallen in the area since dawn, and the street was thronged. Some people lined up for pension checks; others headed for the central market in the hope of finding some of the spring onions and nettles that are almost the only fare there. Still others visited an exhibition of war drawings by Midhat Ajanovic, a locally renowned illustrator. 'Defend Us, Please!'

The mortar blasts that followed, part of a wider Serbian attack that killed 19 civilians and wounded 87 others, was a symptom of the city's deepening miseries, further evidence to many of the 400,000 residents that their ordeal will not end until the Serbian forces starve and bombard the city into submission, or until foreign forces intervene.

Nothing else, most residents now believe, can save them and a 530-year-old city that was once one of the loveliest in Europe.

"Tell Bush, come quickly!," said Dzemila Merdan, a 72-year-old woman who spent the day sheltering from the mortars and artillery shells in a dank tunnel that Austrian forces used to store armaments in World War I. Wrapped in three blankets and a head scarf and wearing her grandson's high-top sneakers, she added: "Tell Bush I spend every day and every night here! Me, an old grandmother! Tell him to come and defend us, please!"

After the attacks today, the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, made a formal appeal to the United Nations Security Council to approve bombing attacks on the Serbian gun positions and on the airfields used by the jet fighter-bombers that support the Serbian gunners.

The letter to the council was written after Mr. Izetbegovic met with Maj. Gen. Lewis A. MacKenzie, the United Nations military commander here. Breaking with his usual practice, General MacKenzie requested that the meeting be held without interpreters. One Mortar Shell, Then Five

The mortar shell that struck the city center at 10:56 A.M. hit in front of the People's Bank and made a crater the size of a pothole. In quick succession, five other mortar shells hit in a broad ring around the first, one exploding in front of a bus stop further down Marshal Tito Street and the others in narrow side streets, none more than 300 yards from the others. For 20 minutes, the anguished cries of the wounded rang through the streets like a dirge.

According to hospital officials, the shells, said to have come from specialized mortars designed for use against enemy infantry, killed 3 people and wounded 40, several of whom required amputations. The rest of the day's toll resulted from Serbian fusillades elsewhere, again mainly civilian districts. Several thousand people have already died in the siege, and hospital corridors are lined with the wounded.

Few of today's shells hit military targets.

Since most of the Serbian gunners have a clear view of the city, it has seemed clear for several weeks that their intent has been to spread terror. Marshal Tito Street and a pedestrian shopping mall that runs off it, Vase Miskina Street, have been hit more intensely than any other part of the city, and the attacks frequently come after lulls have drawn crowds back into the open air. Medical teams rushing to the sites have frequently been fired on, as have burial parties.

'Do They Want to Kill Us All?'

Wherever people gathered after the explosions today, there was an edge of hysteria. "My God! My God!" one woman said as she sheltered from the rockets in a basement off Marshal Tito Street. "When will this stop? Do they want to kill us all?"

On Sarajevo television, images of the explosions were played and re-played, centering on shots of a young woman in a bloodied yellow sweater and blue high-heeled shoes being loaded lifeless onto a truck. The mournful mood was sustained by a recording of a chamber orchestra playing "Ave, Verum Corpus," by Mozart.

With most people busy just surviving, few here have spent much time pondering how the fighting will end. But on some matters, most people seem to agree.

Many residents are convinced that Radovan Karadzic, a psychiatrist and Serbian nationalist leader, has no intention of relenting on the goal he set when he opened the battle for Sarajevo on April 5. The aim has been to take control of large parts of the city, including the center, to serve as the capital of the "ethnically pure" Serbian republic that Serbs have declared on two-thirds of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Despite the widespread condemnation of these tactics, Mr. Karadzic, who is 46 years old, has shown no sign of distancing himself from the bombardment of civilians. Last week, a few hours before the artillery guns began one of their heaviest assaults on residential areas, Mr. Karadzic was shown on Serbian television congratulating the gunners and peering at the city through field-glasses from a bunker above it.

Another commonly shared view is that the Serbs have no intention of allowing the Sarajevo airport, 4.5 miles from the city center, to be opened for relief flights of food and medicine. Earlier this month, the United Nations Security Council settled on the opening of the airport and the establishment of "safe routes" into the city as the first steps toward what it hoped would be an end to the war.

Like almost everything else the United Nations has tried here, the plan ran into bad faith. Both the Serbian nationalists and the Bosnian Government, defending Sarajevo with a mixed force of Muslim, Croatian and Serbian fighters, signed documents pledging to pull heavy weapons back from the airport area and not to disrupt an airlift.

But even as they did so, the airport and its periphery became the scene of one of the fiercest battles of the war.

On Saturday General MacKenzie, the United Nations commander, suspended negotiations about the airport, saying he would withdraw his troops to the United Nations headquarters in the western outskirts of the city and wait until a "continuous cease-fire of 48 hours" was observed. This move and his warning about the "tragic waste of humanity" were ignored. The shelling continued unabated, and reached a new intensity with the attacks today.

The airport fighting also continued with a new savagery. On Saturday, residents of Dobrinja, a suburb abutting the airport that has been encircled by Serbian troops for 12 weeks, telephoned relatives in Sarajevo to report that Serbian troops advancing from the airport had dragged a well-known Sarajevo psychiatrist, Dr. Adnan Tetaric, and his son from their Dobrinja homes and cut their throats while other residents watched on a street corner.

General MacKenzie officially blamed both sides for the collapse of the airport plan. Privately United Nations officials were not so equivocal.

While Bosnian Government forces have broken some lulls in the shooting, they have done so for the most part with light weapons, by firing at the Serbians' gun positions. When the Serbian forces have initiated the battles, as they did when they breached a cease-fire last Monday, it has been with relentless barrages into heavily-populated districts of the city. An Excess of Evenhandedness?

Options for the United Nations force seem few.

One would be to acknowledge that a wider mandate is needed from the Security Council, possibly one that would favor foreign military force against Serbian gun positions. Another is a move to toughen condemnation of the Serbian aggression.

Until now, one United Nations official said, the organization's statements have taken an even-handed tone to avoid alienating the Serbian leaders, including the military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic. "They've wanted me to talk to Mladic, and how can I talk to Mladic if I call him a murderer?," one United Nations official said.

If there has been a surprise in the battle, it has been the city's resilience.

Many residents, including Muslims whose votes put him into office, are bitterly critical of President Izetbegovic, blaming him for not preparing for the war despite mounting signs that Serbs were arming and preparing to seize territory. This left Sarajevo with inadequate reserves for a long siege and the Government forces poorly organized. Little Food, Less Medicine

Although food is scarce, most families have managed at least one meager meal a day. Where matters are pressing, for many families, is in the diet of smaller children, many of whom have eaten little but bread and pasta for nearly three months.

Hospitals, too, face increasingly acute shortages of everything from bandages to painkillers and antibiotics. Doctors say that many wounded die because of the back-up of patients with traumatic shell wounds, some requiring a battery of specialized surgeons.

The Government has done what it can do to bolster defenses.

Most nights, commando teams attack Serbian positions in the hope of capturing weapons and ammunition. Bosnian commanders say they have enough men to put 50,000 under arms, but have weapons for only about 5,000. As for ammunition, one senior officer said last week that there was only enough for three weeks at the current rate of fighting. "And then," he said, raising his hands as if in prayer, "it's a question of 'Please God, help us!' "

The Bosnian troops usually attack from their own gun positions, advancing on all fours while the few heavy guns they have captured lay down covering fire.

One Sarajevo architect who participated in a successful nighttime assault over the weekend on a Serbian position on the Zlatiste hill, southeast of the city center, returned exhausted.

Asked his feelings about the raid, he replied, "When you've seen children with their legs amputated because of this war, you don't think about the risk."

By John F. Burns

On the map, the trip across the lines of the Sarajevo siege doesn't look like much, just a quick journey from the outer suburbs into the city center. In a rented Russian jeep, with jerry-cans of spare fuel making the vehicle into a mobile Molotov cocktail, it is a passage through hell.

Blackened, burned-out houses set back 50 yards from the road, eerily still, serve as snipers' hideouts. Driving flat out, with windows closed and flak jackets pulled up around their necks, those making the trip can sometimes hear shots being fired and mortars exploding. The litter of spent shell casings lie on the road, where there are gaping holes made by mortars, and the blasted wrecks of tanks and trucks.

From the Serbian-held suburb of Ilidza to the relative sanctuary of the United Nations headquarters inside the Bosnian Government lines, less than three miles away, takes only a few minutes, but most who make the dash will never forget it. Many spend hours or days preparing, calculating the least hazardous moment, emblazoning their vehicles with flags and stickers identifying them as foreigners, consulting with others who have made the journey, or waiting for a United Nations military convoy to follow. But in the end it is a leap of hope.

Only Entry Is by Road

Since the United Nations suspended its relief airlift into Sarajevo on Sept. 4, the only way into the city has been by road. On the route preferred by the few foreigners who still come to the city -- relief workers, United Nations military personnel and reporters -- this involves a 150-mile drive of striking beauty from the Adriatic port of Split, along long stretches of unpaved mountain roads where the loudest sounds, apart from passing vehicles, are cowbells in lush pastures flanking the road. Much Seems Untouched

Stretches of the road from Split are bordered by burned-out villages where Croatian forces nominally allied to the Bosnian troops have followed their own version of "ethnic cleansing," driving Serbs from their homes. But much else in western Herzegovina, the Croatian stronghold inside this ethnically divided republic, seems untouched by the war.

At Kiseljak, 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo, used for overnight stops by those moving in and out of the city, new stores have opened, packed with everything that has become scarce inside the siege lines -- fresh produce and canned goods, batteries and chocolate bars, detergents and processed meat. The gas station is busy with vehicles filling jerry-cans. Prices are set at black market levels, payable only in the new Croatian currency used in western Herzegovina, or in German marks.

Soldiers are everywhere, but few are fighting. At a roadblock outside Kiseljak, Croatian and Serbian soldiers, supposedly on opposite sides of the war, relax over card games and bottles of lovovaca, a powerful Bosnian brandy.

Travelers gather shreds of information for what lies ahead. Outbound foreigners are quizzed for clues as to sniper hideouts, mortar positions and recent casualties along the road.

Ultimately, no amount of calculation eliminates the risks. A British officer completing a three-month tour with the United Nations force in Sarajevo chuckled at the sight of reporters preparing their jeep with American and British flags. Is the Sniper Napping?

"Look," he said, "whether you make it or not depends on whether the sniper in that house by the road can be bothered to lift his rifle and fire or not, or whether he's napping. One thing's for certain: These people couldn't care less where you come from, or what you do. If you're in range, you're a target."

From Ilidza, a place of freshwater springs and resort hotels once renowned throughout the Balkans, Sarajevo is a gleaming vision in the autumn sunlight, a tightly packed jumble of modern high-rises and 15th-century mosques hemmed by plunging mountains. But getting there requires driving along a stretch of road known to Sarajevans as "snipers' alley," where firing on everything that moves, even United Nations relief vehicles and ambulances, has been routine for months. Foreigners Detour

Few who have traveled the road more than a few times have not had their vehicles struck by bullets. United Nations troops and civilians move down the road only in convoys protected by armored personnel carriers, with .50-caliber machine guns ready to fire on any attacker.

Recently, the journey has been made still more dangerous by stepped-up fighting for districts near the airport, including Ilidza and the adjacent suburbs of Nedzarici and Stup, that both sides see as the key to the siege. Foreigners, the only people with passes from both sides permitting movement back and forth across the lines, now make a detour, zig-zagging from Ilidza out to the airport road to bypass Stup, then heading back down the airport road until it meets the crosstown boulevard into the city. Running for the Garage

The last 100 yards of the journey, into the underground parking garage of the Holiday Inn, the last major hotel still functioning in the city, are in some ways the worst. The hotel plaza is under constant sniper fire, and drivers must gun their vehicles, tires squealing, to get down the ramp into the garage before the snipers can fire.

Inside the garage, cars that have endured a few weeks of the siege look like wrecks from a stock-car race, riddled with bullet holes, their windshields and side windows shattered.

Not all foreigners think that elaborate precautions are worthwhile. Paul Marchand, a cigar-smoking Frenchman who makes his base in Beirut, mocks the flak jackets and helmets of his fellow reporters, and drives around the city in a straw hat, at the wheel of a battered vehicle with doors that must be held shut and a broken exhaust system that advertises his arrival from a mile away. On the trunk and hood of the car, he has defied the Serbian guns.

"Don't shoot, waste your bullets," his message says in English. "I am immortal."

By John F. Burns

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Oct. 17— Outside the Kosevo hospital a full moon was shining, shedding a cold white light on the freshly buried war dead in the cemetery across the road. It was barely 7 P.M., and the moon and the lights at nursing stations were the only illumination in the crowded wards that house the most grievously wounded victims of the Sarajevo siege.

In a cubicle off a third-floor ward, a short walk from the center island where amputees' beds had been wheeled as protection from the Serbian gun positions in the mountains, Dr. Mufid Lazovic sat with his head in his hands. In passionate, often overwrought bursts, he talked of his bitter experiences working as a surgeon on legions of people wounded in the six-month siege.

"What we have been through here is a great horror, a horror beyond anything I could have imagined," he said, the moon lighting enough of his face to show his tears. "I have been a surgeon 16 years. I have seen many terrible things, but never anything like this. I see dead children -- dead children -- virtually every day. I have nightmares. I have seen such wounds that I wonder, if I survive this war, will I ever be psychologically normal again?"

Dr. Lazovic, a stocky 43-year-old, is a Muslim in a country where Muslims have been by far the most common victims of the war, perhaps 80 percent of the 200,000 people officially estimated to have been killed or wounded.

For 24-hour shifts once every three days, he is chief of a medical team in a trauma clinic that struggles to save civilians whose bodies have been torn by tank and mortar shells and snipers' bullets. It is a battle against fearful odds. Under Artillery Fire

For months, the Kosevo medical complex, a jumble of buildings on one of the most exposed hillsides in Sarajevo, has worked under artillery fire. Virtually every building has holes in its roof and walls, and dozens of its patients have been wounded by shells exploding within the hospital grounds. Windows on every floor have been shattered, and workshops long ago ran out of glass to replace them.

The trauma clinic is the first stop for the most seriously wounded. Many are then transferred to specialized clinics elsewhere on the Kosevo grounds. To stand at the emergency entrance since the siege began in April has been to watch a ghastly procession of bullet-riddled ambulances and, more often, battered private cars, racing up the hill and disgorging victims in bloodied blankets and sheets that serve as stretchers when shells strike in playgrounds, parking lots or city streets.

Inside, relatives press forward in an atmosphere of bedlam. Above the cries of the wounded and their families, doctors and nurses call for intravenous drips and resuscitation equipment, and rush down corridors to an operating room that on busy days is used for dozens of operations, many of them amputations. Sometimes, dead patients lie for hours beneath bloodstained sheets while doctors and nurses struggle to save those still alive.

In one of Dr. Lazovic's 24-hour shifts this week, the clinic registered its 12,000th patient since the war began, a man in his 30's with severe mortar wounds. Record-keeping has suffered, along with much else, so nobody was sure how many patients have died. But the scrawled ledger at the entrance to the emergency department is filled with a repeated entry in Latin, "Mortis ante portas," meaning dead on arrival, and many of the 3,700 who have died in the siege passed through the clinic to the adjacent morgue.

Another unanswered question is how many might have been saved if the clinic had been able to work in something like normal medical conditions. It was hampered from the outset of the siege by the departure of doctors, nurses and others who were Serbs and chose not to remain in a city being devastated by a Serbian army.

Dr. Jovo Vranic, the clinic's 59-year-old director, himself a Serb, said 9 of the 32 doctors on his staff had quit during the siege. At one point, in the summer, the clinic was working with only 50 percent of its normal staff.

But a shortage of people is a less acute problem, for now, than others. Requests for supplies forwarded by the Bosnian Government to the United Nations headquarters, which is responsible for relief convoys, have run to several typewritten sheets -- including antibiotics, pain killers, bottled oxygen, plasma, surgical instruments, syringes, bandages, gauze, liniment, rubber gloves, smocks, sheets and a score of other items.

United Nations relief, interrupted by the fighting, has come nowhere close to meeting the needs. Yet the material shortages are mild in their effect compared with what the Serbian leaders have accomplished by cutting off the city's electricity and water.

For months, since the siege forces started using their control of the city's utilities as a weapon, the clinic has relied mainly on its diesel-powered generator. This, consuming eight gallons of diesel fuel an hour, has often been shut down for lack of fuel in a city where diesel fuel and gasoline, when any is available, fetches black-market prices of $25 to $30 a gallon.

Triage of Sorts

On Wednesday afternoon, as dusk settled over the mountains ringing the city, Dr. Lazovic was racing up a flight of stairs to check on a recent amputee with gangrenous infections on the clinic's intensive care unit when he was intercepted by Nedim Masic, a 26-year-old electrical engineer doing war duty as the clinic's head of security. One of Mr. Masic's duties is switching the generator's 130 kilowatts of power from one part of the clinic to another, and he needed to know Dr. Lazovic's requirements.

"We're down to five hours of diesel, doctor," Mr. Masic said. "What do you want, the elevators or the X-ray machines, or the sterilization and the elevators?"

Dr. Lazovic paused, ran some mental calculations, and decided to forgo the buildings' elevators, since the 50 kilowatts of power they use is more than the generator can handle when it is supplying the radiography department and the unit that sterilizes surgical instruments. At 6.30 P.M., to save fuel for the morning, the generator was shut down.

The lack of electricity means that often surgeons must work with no power other than that supplied by an emergency battery, an army unit that sits in a box on the operating-room floor. This powers a single light, and some but not all of the anesthesiology equipment. More than 200 operations, some of them to remove deeply lodged bullets and mortar fragments or infected tissue, have been conducted without X-rays or respiratory monitors.

Patients' relatives also bear heavy burdens. A week ago a mortar shell landed among children playing in the old city, killing three instantly and seriously wounding 10 and necessitating surgery on two girls, one 7 years old.

For the 7-year-old, Dr. Lazovic decided on immediate surgery to avoid the possibility of amputation, but the clinic's generator had been idled for lack of fuel. "I told the girl's father, we need 30 liters of fuel, and without it I cannot guarantee that we can save your daughter's legs," Dr. Lazovic said.

The father, an office worker, set off on foot in search of the fuel, and returned with a can within an hour. Dr. Lazovic said that the operation and one on the second girl were completed without incident, and that both girls were expected to recover. Most doctors in the clinic have similar stories, many of them involving last-minute appeals to the Bosnian Army, which controls much of what remains of the city's fuel.

Hygiene in the clinic is poor. The lack of running water and a working laundry has led to huge piles of soiled and bloodstained linen piling up outside the clinic's garage, waiting for a truck with fuel to carry it to an incinerator. Unless relatives provide clean sheets, patients lie for days or even weeks on the same sheets, or with no sheets at all.

Doctors and nurses go to the operating room time and again in the same smocks. Even the swabbing of bloodstains off the floors is sporadic, again because of the shortage of water.

Food may be the most serious problem of all. At lunchtime on Wednesday, Dr. Lazovic was in the intensive care unit checking on an infection in what remained of the right leg of Adzul Cosic, a 32-year-old coal miner who had come to Sarajevo as a refugee. Mr. Cosic, who was hit by a mortar on Monday, was in obvious pain, and Dr. Lazovic decided to schedule a fourth operation on Mr. Cosic's stump. In the meantime, he urged the grimacing man to try to take some food.

What that meant was evident from a tray lying on a trolley near the bed: a cup of cold tea, a slice of hardened bread and a tea-cup saucer with a few tiny scraps of fish.

"That's better than usual," the doctor said. "There wouldn't usually be any fish." His own lunch, taken cold at mid-afternoon in the clinic's cafeteria, consisted of a bowl of thin tomato soup, laced with rice, as well as cup of a tea and a slice of bread.

'Apathy' Is Seen

A memorandum to the medical staff that was posted near a nursing station in the clinic, written by Dr. Abdullah Nakash, the Bosnian surgeon general, spoke of "demotivation, apathy and chronically low working output" among doctors and nurses as a result of the working conditions, and of the problems that hospital workers share with everybody else in Sarajevo, like finding food for their families in a city where there is almost nothing but bread.

Dr. Nakash's solution was a special government committee to work on the medical staff's personal concerns. But Dr. Lazovic is less worried about his own welfare than his patients'. Every third day, he walks almost two miles to work from the courtyard home he shares with his wife, Jasmina, 40 years old, who is a nurse, and his two sons, Irfan, 11, and Farouk, 9.

The journey has often been punctuated by falling mortars and tank shells. For months, until the autumn weather made it too cold, the family, together with the doctor's 65-year-old mother, lived in a tiny basement cellar at the house, for the protection it afforded from the shells. Still, Dr. Lazovic counts himself lucky, because nobody in his immediate family has been hurt.

What troubles him most, to the point that tears well up in his eyes again, is what the privations are doing to the morale of those in his care. He has lost count of the number of amputations he has performed, mostly on legs, although he knows it runs into the dozens.

Nevertheless, he says he stays awake at night going over every case, wondering what could be done -- about hygiene, among other problems -- that would make it easier to decide against amputation in borderline cases.

"For the first time in my career, I come in fear to work," he said. I never know what awaits me, but I am always sure of one thing, that I cannot give the patients the help they need. It is terrible thing to have to live with, to know that if we had the equipment and the power and the materials, we could be doing so much more. And always there is the question: What have these people done to deserve this? What have they ever done to earn so much hatred?"

Like many Sarajevans, Dr. Lazovic speaks of his city as a place where Serbs and Muslims and Croats lived in harmony with one another, each culture enriching the other. It is a vision rejected by the Serbian nationalists who started the war, whose purpose has been to create a separate Serbian state in Bosnia -- later, perhaps, to be annexed to Serbia -- where Serbs would be permanently secured against having to live under a Muslim-majority government.

Dr. Lazovic has lived his own vision of a multinational society. Of the nine doctors on his team at the clinic since the siege started, four are Serbs, four are Muslims, and one is a Croat. His favorite pastime before the siege was choral singing, as a baritone in a Sarajevo choir that won several European competitions. Performed in Cathedral

When he speaks of his favorite performances, many were of works rooted in the Christian tradition -- among them, Mozart's Requiem, which he sang with the choir in a performance at Sarajevo's Roman Catholic cathedral last Christmas.

On a visit to the hospital's morgue to check on whether a patient transferred to another clinic had died, he seemed angry, at first, as an old woman was wheeled in with a bullet wound to the head and laid among a dozen other war victims.

But after a minute, pacing by himself, he began singing in a low voice, in English, the half-remembered words of an American spiritual: Nobody knows the troubles I've seen, Nobody knows my sorrows.

After repeating the chorus, his voice welled up in the cold concrete room. "Glory, hallelujah," he sang.

By John F. Burns

PROZOR, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Oct. 29— In the year of "ethnic cleansing," there is little in this mountain town that is not chillingly familiar.

Stores and restaurants still burn on the main street, three days after notices were posted on lampposts and shattered storefronts ordering the pillaging halted. Along forest roads leading from the town, terrified Muslim refugees hasten away with pitiful bundles of belongings.

Heavily built men in camouflage gear lounge amid the ruins, engaging in sporadic looting and insisting that nothing terrible has happened. Serbs Are Spectators

The scene has been played out scores of times since Serbian nationalist troops began offensives across Bosnia and Herzegovina in April, emptying towns and villages of Muslims so that the land could be claimed for a Serbian ministate free of other ethnic groups.

But here, Serbian soldiers have been spectators, watching from gun batteries in the hills while another unsparing army, of Croatian nationalists, has inflicted its wrath on Muslim townspeople.

"Kill, kill," a young Muslim man with brimming tears whispered in English to a reporter who drove into Prozor past roadblocks of suspicious Croatian troops to find what has become a ghost town. "They kill all -- man, woman, child, no difference. It is great tragedy."

Of at least 5,000 Muslims who lived here quietly until last week, the only ones remaining were on a hill a few hundred yards from the main street, apparently under arrest by Croatian forces.

How many Muslims died here is impossible to tell. But the extensive damage to the town, and accounts given to reporters by refugees in the hills who spoke of Croatian fighters storming through the streets, shouting through megaphones, "Come on boys, let's get the filthy Muslims!" suggested that the estimate given by the town's Croatian Mayor, Mijo Jozic, of 6 Muslims dead and 68 wounded was probably low. The Muslim-led Government in Sarajevo, 40 miles to the east, has estimated at least 300 Muslim casualties here.

Before the war that has broken Bosnia and Herzegovina into a jagged patchwork of territories ruled by ethnic warlords, Prozor was a quiet mountain town where the main activity was a bicycle factory that shipped its products to Austria and Germany.

But since Friday, the factory has been a Croatian military headquarters, and Prozor has become synonymous, among Bosnian Muslims, with the collapse of an alliance between Muslims and Croats that the Muslims had counted on in their increasingly desperate war with the Serbs. No More Pretense

Starting 10 days ago, and spreading quickly through the towns and villages that cluster along the Bosna and Vrbas rivers north and west of Sarajevo, Croatian troops have forsaken the pretense of a pact with the Muslims to preserve Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign state.

Instead, the Croats have followed the Serbian lead, fighting street battles with the Muslim-led forces of the Sarajevo Government in what appears to be a bid to consolidate the frontiers of a Croatian ministate.

Localized fighting has erupted at half a dozen towns along the river valleys, some of it, as in the town of Vitez, involving such matters as which side will control the local gas station. But a drive along 200 miles of mountain highways and dirt tracks in the region reveals a pattern of an impatient and often ruthless bid to impose exclusive Croatian control over an area where Croats and Muslims have lived side by side for centuries.

The fighting has mostly subsided, with sullen standoffs in towns like Vitez, Travnik and Novi Travnik. But urgent appeals by the Muslim-led Bosnian Government, fighting to hold onto a handful of towns from its seat in Sarajevo, appear unlikely to persuade the Bosnian Croats and the man who ultimately controls their fighting units, President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, to revive the alliance.

An Ideal Appears Dead

What has happened here -- and especially the Croatian onslaught in Prozor, where the Croatian fighters appear to have been merciless in their attacks on Muslims -- has sounded across Bosnia like a death knell. In the spring and summer, when Serbian fighters were seizing two-thirds of this former Yugoslav republic, the ideal proclaimed in Sarajevo -- that Muslims, Serbs and Croats could somehow come together again in a single state -- had seemed more and more unrealizable. Now it looks all but dead.

With their tightening control up and down the valleys around Prozor, the Croatian forces have virtually completed their takeover of western Herzegovina, where 90 percent of the residents are Croats. With this and a few other parcels of land around predominantly Croatian population centers in northern Bosnia, they have assembled the territory they need for their ministate, which they have named Herzeg-Bosna.

Croatian and Serbian forces are fighting now in only a few places, where their ministates overlap, and even these battles are rapidly diminishing.

At dusk today, the Sarajevo Government announced that Serbian forces had captured the mixed Croatian and Muslim town of Jajce, 50 miles northwest of Sarajevo, which a joint Croatian and Muslim force had defended since the war began. Jajce, with 10,000 residents, was one of only half a dozen towns of any size still under the Sarajevo Government's control.

Holding onto the town, when the only path through the Serbian siege lines was a mountain track that was used only at night by vehicles with extinguished lights, had become increasingly difficult. But reports from the area said the Serbs did not break through until this morning, after the town's fate was sealed by mistrust between the Croatian and Muslim defenders.

Feud Leads to Downfall

Ivica Saric, a Croatian spokesman, told reporters that survivors of the Croatian units that were overrun in Jajce reached Travnik today after hiking through the mountains and reported that the Croatian and Bosnian Government units had begun feuding in Jajce after fighting between the two groups erupted elsewhere.

"They said the reason Jajce fell was the distrust between Croatian and Muslim soldiers," Mr. Saric said.

Although powerful officials in the Sarajevo Government have advocated fighting a two-front war with the Serbian and Croatian forces, President Alija Izetbegovic argued successfully in emergency meetings last weekend that the Muslims had no choice but to try to renew the alliance with the Croats.

Part of Mr. Izetbegovic's reasoning was that Mr. Tudjman, the Croatian leader, is not likely to make the partitioning of this republic into Serbian and Croatian ministates official for fear that Croatia could be subjected to United Nations trade sanctions, as the truncated Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia was in May after the offensives in Bosnia began.

Also, the Croatian forces include thousands of Muslim fighters. Many of these, as well as at least some Croats, are opposed to the partitioning of Bosnia.

At the Croatian headquarters in Prozor, where scores of fighters were relaxing after seizing the town, some said they still considered the Serbs the enemy and the Muslims as potential allies.

"Don't forget, most Croats here voted for an independent Bosnia back in February," said a 38-year-old commander, who gave his name only as Zeljko. "If the politicians can work out the details, that would still be the first choice."

But talks between Muslim, Serbian and Croatian leaders in Geneva have deadlocked, with the Serbs and Croats holding out for powerful ethnically based governments in areas under their control, and the Muslims, the largest ethnic group, opposing any breakup along ethnic lines.

Meanwhile, Herzeg-Bosna, the Croatian ministate, as well as the ministate proclaimed by the Bosnian Serb leaders in April, are operating like provinces of Croatia and Serbia. The Croatian dinar is the currency in Herzeg-Bosna, and Croatian flags, with their red and white checkerboard badge, fly in every village and town.

And after the bloodshed in Prozor, it would seem that re-establishing a normal life between Croats and Muslims could take years. From accounts given by Muslims, it seemed clear that Croatian units showed little restraint once they gained the upper hand.

An indication of the Croats' attitude could be found in the fact that some Croatian fighters encountered along the main street wore armbands with skull-and-crossbones motifs and the letter U for Ustashe, the World War II Nazi collaborators who ruled Croatia and Bosnia with great brutality. One teen-age fighter posed for photographs in front of burning Muslim stores in a wartime German officer's cap bearing an Iron Cross.

While the handful of Muslims encountered in the town appeared too frightened to talk, except in quick bursts when the Croatian fighters were out of earshot, those who reached predominantly Muslim villages in the surrounding hills offered grim accounts of Croatian units firing at random on houses and stores, then sending tractors through the town to collect bodies.

Many of the Muslims said they had lost touch with family members, and were trekking from village to village looking for survivors.

By John F. Burns

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nov. 18— It is cold now at the home of Amra and Sakir Dzirlo, bitterly so when the winter wind beats against the plastic sheeting that has replaced window glass broken by exploding shells. But the chill that pervades 27 Marshal Tito Street is deeper than the physical hardships of the Sarajevo siege.

As winter sets in, there is a bleakness of mood that pervades the old apartment, something that transcends the need to burn old furniture for heating and the dwindling food reserves that have cut the diet for the family of six to the meanest levels.

"There is a new saying in Sarajevo," Mr. Dzirlo said the other day: " 'We have all lived here together. We will all die here together.' "

An Intolerable Life

The pressures from the Serbian nationalists who have besieged the city for seven months, reducing much of it to rubble with their artillery and denying supplies of food, electricity and water to the 400,000 residents, have made life for many intolerable.

Among the Dzirlos -- Sakir, a 44-year-old electrical engineer; Amra, a 42-year-old architect and interior designer, and their four children, two daughters and twin sons -- thoughts have turned to something that was once unthinkable: whether they should try to escape and join more than a million other Bosnian Muslims who have become refugees.

"Here is tragical situation, like Spania, when Ferdinand and Isabella say to Muslims, Jewish, 'Go out,' " said Mr. Dzirlo, who traces his family's roots to the last of the Spanish Moors. He continued in his fractured English: "But say me, where must we go if we cannot stay here -- to Libya or something? Maybe to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait? Are we complete rubbish people, to wander about for few hundred years, look for another place?" Preparing for the Impossible

For the moment, discussion of fleeing is moot, since the Bosnian Army defending Sarajevo has said it will permit no more evacuations, and the Serbian forces are seizing Muslims to exchange for Serbian prisoners.

The family's worst nightmare is that the city's defenders will crack and Serbs will pour into the city, exacting terrible revenge on the residents who have held out against them for so long. But many families, including the Dzirlos, have concluded that even if the defense holds, it may be impossible to survive the winter, with insufficient food and heat and with no way to seal the gaping holes in their roof and walls that have been made by Serbian shells.

To prepare for the moment when they can wait no longer, the family car has a jerrycan of gasoline, bought on the black market, and a new battery. Every document that could help the family resettle elsewhere has been pulled from dusty files, including the expired New York State driver's license that Mr. Dzirlo got during a year of graduate engineering studies at New York University.

A Funeral The Adults Mourn, The Young Dream

The turning point for the Dzirlos (the name is pronounced JEER-low) came two weeks ago, after their next-door neighbor and close family friend, Hamid Pasic, a 79-year-old retired professor of medicine at the University of Sarajevo, was killed by a mortar during an afternoon stroll.

As if to demonstrate that he, at least, would not be cowed by the shelling, Dr. Pasic had insisted on going out every day for a walk up and down Tito Street, visiting street-corner markets to see if there was any food that his modest pension could buy, consoling survivors. "Everything will be O.K.," he would say, chuckling.

After the mortar blast, it took two days for Mr. Dzirlo to trace his friend, telephoning police stations and morgues until officials at the old military hospital a mile away said a body fitting a description of the old man had been brought in.

A funeral was arranged in an old Muslim cemetery at Vrabanusja, up cobblestone alleyways that lead to one of the oldest Muslim quarters. Mr. Dzirlo was one of a handful of mourners, glancing nervously toward Serbian gun positions on the hills. Allah's Will

Afterwards, as he paced quickly back down the hill, the normally voluble Mr. Dzirlo was silent. The silence continued around the Dzirlos' cramped dining table, save for the studied cheeriness of Amra Dzirlo, who had laid on a late lunch of home-made quince juice and ustipak, the fried batter cakes that are a staple among the Muslims.

After a while, Mr. Dzirlo gave voice to his thoughts. "Who knows who will be next?" he asked. "You? Me? Amra? The children? Mrs. Pasic? We are alone now, except for Allah. If it is Allah's will, we will survive."

Mr. Dzirlo's remarks set off a brief debate, conducted in English out of courtesy to this reporter, who met the Dzirlos in early June and has spent weeks with the family, following their progress in several dispatches.

The 14-year-old twins, Mahir and Malik, were all for planning an escape. But Meliha, the 16-year-old daughter, demurred. "What is the point to talk about things that are impossible?" she asked.

Lejla, her 10-year-old sister, asked for a translation. "I would like to go to New York, maybe Hollywood," she said, reeling off names learned from television programs that have been mostly a memory since Serbian forces cut off electricity in July.

The Crossroads Revenge Stains The Old Tolerance

Sarajevo is at the northern fringe of the zone where the worlds of Europe and the Orient meet, and the city's ethnic heterogeneity is a testament to the fact that diversity was tolerated during much of its history.

Serbian nationalists have now seized much of Bosnia and Herzegovina for a Serbian mini-state that as been "ethnically cleansed" of Muslims and Croats. But the Ottoman Turks, the Muslims who ruled Bosnia for four centuries until they were driven out in 1878, tolerated Roman Catholic Croats and Eastern Orthodox Serbs, as well as Jews.

How completely the cultures blended is apparent after one mounts the darkened stone stairwell to the Dzirlos' second-floor apartment.

Inside, there is a foyer where shoes are removed in the Muslim tradition, and carpets where the family kneels at 5 A.M. for the first of five daily prayers. Beyond is a living room filled with filigreed screens and tables from Turkey, the home of Amra Dzirlo's ancestors, and delicate oil paintings of wooden vessels with graceful sails moving down the Nile.

But along with these, there is also a Viennese grand piano dating to the 1880's. On nights of intensive shelling, Meliha, considered one of Sarajevo's most promising young pianists, plays Beethoven sonatas and the twins play classical guitar.

In such a home there is no need to belabor points that Muslims in Sarajevo are often keen to make: that by standards of education and professional skills and cosmopolitan tastes, they have no reason to feel inferior to the Serbs, and that while they observe traditions of Islam engendered in the Middle East, they consider themselves no less European than, say, Germans or Italians, and in any case no more strangers here than Serbs.

As a matter of ethnicity the point is irrefutable since, unlike the Dzirlos, most Muslims in Sarajevo are Slavs, like the Serbs. The Slavic Muslims converted to Islam under Ottoman rule, filled many of the civil-service positions under the Ottomans and developed into a class of educated, urban landholders, more and more distinct from the predominantly rural, agricultural and less educated Serbs.

'Genocide' Against the 'Filth'

But the Serbian nationalists accuse the Muslims of being traitors to the Slavic people, and such denunciations have been used to justify, and perhaps to inspire, the "ethnic cleansing" that has driven more half of Bosnia's Muslims from their homes, and killed and wounded tens of thousands.

The Serbian militiamen who have done much of the killing refer to Muslims as borije, or filth, and say their job will be done when Muslims revert to being Serbs, or are eliminated.

To Sakir Dzirlo, this amounts to "genocide," requiring Muslims to fight back as long as it takes to avenge what has happened in the war. But Amra Dzirlo takes the lead in citing the Koran's teachings on tolerance. "Tomorrow, I forget all, if war is stop," she said. Interethnic 'Honesty'

What all the Dzirlos agree on is that Sarajevo should be neither a Muslim nor a Serbian city, but a place where all groups co-exist.

Within the family, the war is seen as being not so much between between Serbs and Muslims and Croats as between raja, a Bosnian term meaning honest people of any ethnic group, and papak, literally the hoof of a farm animal, a disparaging phrase to refer to people hostile to urban mingling. Few things please Mr. Dzirlo more than meeting a Serbian friend and proclaiming: "This man is raja."

In contrast, he denounces Radovan Karadzic, the Sarajevo psychiatrist who is leader of the Serbian nationalist party in Bosnia. Mr. Karadzic came to Sarajevo as a boy from a mountain village in Montenegro, the smaller of the two remaining republics of the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav federation, and Mr. Dzirlo delights in mocking him: "Karadzic is papak, he come from mountains, from sheep, and he want to be king." A Gadfly Beseeching Serbs, Beseeching Bush

Until the outbreak of the war, Mr. Dzirlo took little interest in politics. As long as Yugoslavia was under Communist rule, Mr. Dzirlo, like many professional people here, concentrated on his work and his family, privately disparaging the Communist system but avoiding open opposition.

But since the siege began, the apartment on Tito Street has become a sort of unofficial citizen's bureau. Before the Serbian forces cut off telephone links with the outside world, Mr. Dzirlo tried to dial President Bush, President Francois Mitterand and other international figures, seeking their intercession in the war.

"My name is Sakir Dzirlo, and I am writing to you in the name of all honest citizens who stayed in ruins in Sarajevo," he wrote to Mr. Bush in June. "This is crime war from robbers of Serbia, Montenegro and Yugoslav Army on citizens of Sarajevo. You could stop this holocaust but you did not, and we don't know why."

In the early weeks of the siege, when the Serbian officers commanding Yugoslav Army units shelling the city were still in nearby barracks, Mr. Dzirlo walked to the barracks, argued his way in and confronted Gen. Milutin Kukanjac, the army commander.

"What do you think you are doing?" he asked, according to a friend from Tito Street who was present. "Are you mad or something?"

The Children The Cruel Lessons Learned Under Fire

For the Dzirlo children, the war has meant an end to schooling. But it has not meant an end to learning: their mother takes them to libraries and borrows books from friends on languages and science and literature, reminding the children of the Koran's insistence on the need for study. Anything about the United States is encouraged, particularly books dealing with American liberties.

"It is reason why America go straight up, in economy, in politics, because you are watching individual," Mr. Dzirlo said.

Education of a more unusual kind has come from dodging from doorway to doorway under shellfire, and dashing across intersections to avoid Serbian snipers.

Mahir and Malik have been on the streets almost every day, usually accompanying their father in a daily round of fetching water from the mosques, visiting Mr. Dzirlo's ailing mother, who lives nearby, lining up for bread and scouring the city for increasingly scarce bundles of wood.

Now, when the neighborhood is hit by a shell, the boys identify it instantly. "That was PAM," Malik said one day, using the Yugoslav military term for 40-millimeter antiaircraft guns. Making Do for Food

On other occasions, when sniper bullets have whizzed overhead, the twins have talked like battle veterans, advising on routes that narrow the snipers' field of fire. "Fast here!" they will shout, springing across a roadway, or "Keep down!"

Usually, the daughters stay inside, helping their mother, and it is to them, as much as to the men, that the family will owe its survival if it makes it through until spring. For months, they have been preparing stocks of food, discreetly, so as not to stir resentment among neighbors.

They will not estimate how long they can hold out on their reserves of flour and cooking oil, tea and toilet paper and candles and soap. A hint has come from Meliha, but it has been grim. "Until January, if we are still alive by then," she said, with a grim chuckle.

It is a tribute to Amra Dzirlo's ingenuity that the family has anything to eat but bread, pasta and rice. She has scoured the city for rose petals and herb grasses and fruits of every kind, apples and quinces and pears, to make jams and preserves, as well as delicacies like kiflice, a sweet cake. Generosity Through Sacrifice

Visitors are treated to generous snacks and meals, and she waves away compliments as if anything less would be a dereliction of hospitality.

Often, visitors eat alone. Even at mealtimes, the family's habit is to say that they have already eaten, although the absence of any dirty plates suggests otherwise, as does the fact that Amra Dzirlo has lost more than 30 pounds during the siege.

But it is part of the protocol of the siege, and of the Dzirlos' family pride, that visitors accept the hospitality without demurral. Sooner than eat herself, Amra Dzirlo will frequently offer a second helping. 25 Funerals, and More

Little is said about the Dzirlos' economic losses in the war, which include the disappearance of tens of thousands of dollars in savings from the Sarajevo branches of banks with headquarters in Serbia.

The family has lost count of relatives and friends and neighbors who have been killed, including friends of the children. Mr. Dzirlo has attended at least 25 funerals, and those were only the ones that he could get to when he was not at work.

His job, as an executive of the Sarajevo electricity utility, Elektroprivreda, has been a source of relentless frustration. Every time transmission towers and transformer stations attacked by the Serbian forces are repaired, they are attacked again, so the city never has more than a fraction of its peacetime electrical power, and often none at all.

In September, the utility's headquarters was destroyed by fire, along with its records. Now, going to work is largely a formality for Sakir Dzirlo.

Before the war, Amra Dzirlo also juggled her career with her family; now, like most Sarajevans, she is out of work.

"We are sitting and we are watching," Mr. Dzirlo said.

'A Little Trick' Goes Awry

Mostly, his inventiveness goes into schemes to keep the household working. Candles have been made from strips of polyethylene cut from lighting fixtures in abandoned buildings, or from shoelaces floating in cooking oil. To assure getting news after the batteries in their transistor radio ran out, an old car battery has been hooked to a Sony Walkman. One of the children tunes into Radio Sarajevo or the British Broadcasting Corporation, listens through the headphones and relays items to the others.

Sometimes, Mr. Dzirlo's efforts go awry, as they did when he announced that he had organized "a little trick" that would divert a small amount of emergency electricity to the family from a local distribution board.

The plan was for the power to be fed to the home of a friendly neighbor, from there to Dr. Pasic's apartment, and by a cable through Dr. Pasic's back window to the Dzirlos. Each apartment along the way would get power, so neighbors would not accuse Mr. Dzirlo of abusing his position at the utility.

But the scheme went wrong when a technician routed the power to an apartment of a family the Dzirlos hardly knew. Mr. Dzirlo, frantic, ended up stringing cables from a balcony overlooking Tito Street, with a crowd of eager onlookers shouting queries about where the power was coming from.

By the time he had strung cables to every neighbor who needed mollifying, there was only enough left for the Dzirlos to light a single table lamp and the children's fish tank.

Pretty soon, even that supply failed. Weeks later, the family was still laughing over the incident.