Yugoslavia

The effort to secure peace in Yugoslavia cannot succeed unlessit is based on justice and fairness to those who wish to remain part of Yugoslavia as well as to those who may wish to secede from Yugoslavia to create independent states.Serbia does not plead for the creation of a so-called ''Greater Serbia.'' Such an entity is a historical anachronism and such desires are unrealistic. But the interest of the Serbian people in preserving the legal continuity and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia is understandable when one considers that Serbs live not only in Serbia, but in other Yugoslav republics as well.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Yugoslovia's president sent federal army units to a small village in the republic of Croatia yesterday following reports of violent clashes between Croatian security forces and Serbian villagers who had seized the local police station.There were conflicting reports about casualties. Belgrade radio quoted a reporter on the scene as saying that at least six people had been killed.Croatia's Interior Ministry said no one had been hurt. All accounts agreed that shots had been fired.

The Yugoslav crisis is to Western Europe what the Gulf crisis was to the U.S. President Bush claimed that the Gulf crisis was a test of the future of the New World Order; the West Europeans see the Yugoslav crisis as a test of the future of a new European order.The Yugoslav crisis is a result of conflicting ethnic rivalries in a country where populations and historic roots overlap. The conflict between the federation and republics seeking independence has now been complicated by Slobodan Milosevic's drive for Greater Serbia.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The Yugoslav army went into maximum combat readiness yesterday, mobilizing reserves in Serbia, as local militiamen in breakaway Slovenia persisted in their refusal to allow the army to return to barracks as arranged the night before.The orders followed a demand by Slovenia's President Milan Kucan that United Nations observers be sent to the breakaway republic to monitor the cease-fire and withdrawal of Yugoslav army units.Slovenian leaders, whose militiamen have the Yugoslav army pinned down in several locations without communications, electricity or food, have said they fear that the army would use the withdrawal as a ruse to regroup and attack positions in Slovenia again.

Salzburg,Austria -- The crisis in Yugoslavia is the great preoccupation of Austrians, while still emotionally remote from the rest of Western Europe, which is preoccupied in August by sun, sea and sex. War is not what people want to hear about.Austrians have good reason to worry about war in Yugoslavia, on their southern border. If Serbia succeeds in annexing the Serbian-populated regions of Croatia, which it looks very much like doing -- given the fragility of cease-fires and the failure to date of the European Community's attempt to mediate -- this will be the first successful act of military aggression in Europe since World War II.The symbolic and political implications of this would be very great.

PARIS -- Crime pays, at least in the short run. Whether it does so in the long term is open to debate, and to historical and philosophical investigation and speculation. In the former Yugoslavia, it has paid.Crime has not produced the Greater Serbia sought by Slobodan Milosevic and his associates, but it has produced what amounts to a Greater Croatia, and it has purged -- probably for good -- the three major successor-states of Yugoslavia of their ethnically undesirable citizens. It has even done that for Bosnia-Herzogovina, which declared that it wanted to remain an ethnically heterogeneous state.

I WAIT and I worry. I devour every news story about the conflict. Yugoslavs are killing Yugoslavs. It is one of my worst nightmares. I am a Serbian-American with family still back in the old country, and I am very proud of my culture's glorious heritage.But I am profoundly saddened by the events in Slovenia and Croatia and the part the Serbian government has played in tearing at the seams of the country while claiming to keep it together. The fact that the leaders are communists is only incidental.

Paris -- The ''South Slavs'' should never have been put together. To do so may have seemed a good idea at the time, but today it seems otherwise although those most concerned have yet to confront the alternatives, which could prove much worse. But when people are determined no longer to live together the problem becomes how to divide them with as little bloodshed as possible.The two sides in Yugoslavia belong to different politico-cultural worlds, Muslim and Orthodox in the south and east, where the Byzantine and Ottoman empires dominated until the 19th Century, and Roman Catholic in the northwest, where the Slovenian people live in close proximity with Alpine German-speakers and Italians, and the Croats with Hungarians.

WASHINGTON -- George W. Bush may not know the names of Yugoslavia's new leaders; if he does, he most likely cannot pronounce them. But Mr. Bush's instincts are right. His view is that Washington should not get involved in micromanaging events in the Balkans and that the Europeans should take the lead in matters in their own back yard. Galvanized by the recent bloodless revolution against Slobodan Milosevic's rule, the Europeans have indeed acted vigorously. The European Union (EU) has pledged $2 billion in aid over the next seven years to rebuild Yugoslavia's shattered economy.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The Karadjordjevic dynasty, kings of pre-Communist Yugoslavia, are preparing to make a comeback as a political force in the land from which they are constitutionally banished.Prince Alexander Karadjordjevic, the exiled pretender to the throne who was born in London's Claridge Hotel in 1945, has accepted a joint invitation by all non-Communist parties in Serbia to return with his family and take up residence at his sumptuous Beli Dvor (White Palace) ancestral home Oct. 5.The announcement was made at a joint news conference yesterday by the leaders of opposition parties led by Vuk Draskovic.