Rebel Serbs See Themselves as Victims of a Global Plot : Yugoslavia: Fighters’ quest for an expanded Serbia is fueled in part by a sense of historical injustice.

DERVENTA, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  Westerners convinced that the war in the Balkans neither involves them nor threatens their future should heed the warnings of Serbs like Col. Slavko Lisica.

The commander of Serbian rebel forces for much of conquered northern Bosnia claims that his people are the innocent victims of an international plot to eradicate the Serbian nation and that they have taken up arms only to ensure their “biological survival.”

“Europe will pay for what it did to Yugoslavia,” vows the angry colonel, alternately accusing the Vatican and Germany of instigating a worldwide persecution of Serbs.

Bosnia never existed, the career officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army insists. “This is Serbia,” he proclaims of the once-multiethnic cities of Derventa and Bosanski Brod that his forces have laid to ruin and expunged of non-Serbs.

Despite his heartfelt declarations, the rolling hills and fertile farmland of this region have never been part of Serbia--neither during the nation’s medieval heyday nor as part of the now-withered Yugoslav federation.

Serbian claims to this land and much more of the troubled Balkan peninsula are based on the fact that ethnic Serbs have been among those who have lived here, thereby fulfilling the nationalist definition that any place with a single Serbian grave constitutes Serbian land.

Lisica, who led the Serbian invasions of northern Bosnia last summer and autumn, claims to have “brilliantly liberated” the territory from ethnic enemies without firing a shot. The charred skeletons of high-rise apartment buildings and endless vistas of wreckage and rubble were left by the retreating population that fled in fear of the Serbian advance, he contends.

He denies that his rebels have engaged in the deplored practice of “ethnic cleansing,” by which hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats have been routed from their Bosnian homes.

In an attempt to explain the absence of non-Serbs who composed the majority of the population here, Lisica contends that they threw themselves in the Sava River in fear of retribution and drowned.

The colonel’s fantastic view of the Bosnian conflict might sound to Western listeners like the ravings of one who has lost touch with reality. But the powerful officer of the rogue Serbian army genuinely believes and forcefully implements the policies of nationalist masters in Belgrade. His revisions and justifications are typical of Serbian leaders committed to spreading their perceived quest for justice throughout Europe.

Bosnia and Croatia, where an earlier war for territory was fought and won, are just the first arenas of a long-term campaign to construct the expanded country that, according to the Serbs of the Balkans, history owes them.

They point to Serbian allegiance to the winning sides of both world wars as a debt for which the West should give Belgrade access to the Adriatic Sea--a territorial payoff at the expense of Croatia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 and a Nazi puppet state during World War II.

Diplomatic entreaties against taking land by force are rejected by the rebel leaders, who consider Western denunciation of their tactics as further evidence of conspiracy against Serbs.

“We are peace-loving people. We want progress--we want to learn about computers and not about guns and fighting machines,” insists the colonel. “However, there is an international plot, and we are very well aware of it. We are ready to fight to the last man.”

Lisica’s perspective on the 11-month-old Bosnian conflict, in which Serbian forces have conquered 70% of the republic’s territory, was offered to humanitarian relief officials who visited northern Bosnia last month.

Although the aim of the tour, conducted at Serbian insistence, was to pry aid from Western sources to rebuild the homes and industries destroyed by war, the hosts repeatedly turned menacing toward the relief officials they were ostensibly courting.

“You took $10 billion from us and now will give us back $500 million, and we are supposed to be satisfied!” Lisica said, implying that Western aid agencies are part of the perceived conspiracy pauperizing the region.

Stabbing his gold-tipped cigarette holder toward Jose Maria Mendiluce, the chief delegate of the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, Lisica added bitterly: “That is the robbery of the Balkans!”

Lisica personifies the aggrieved Serbian warrior, a self-image of suffering and sacrifice that grew out of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo at which the Kingdom of Serbia lost to Ottoman Turkey but inflicted such losses on the attackers that their advance on the rest of Europe was slowed.

Proud of their martyr history, Serbs celebrate their greatest defeat as the chief national holiday each June 28.

The collapse of Yugoslavia, brought on in large part by the divisive nationalist policies of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, has fueled the Serbs’ nurtured sense of historical injustice. And nowhere is the feeling of having been mistreated more evident than in the ranks of the Yugoslav People’s Army, which no longer has a federation to protect.

Like the ruthless commander of Bosnian Serb forces, Gen. Ratko Mladic, Lisica was a career officer with the pampered and oversized army that fractured with the federal breakup, marooning ethnic Serb officers in republics now recognized as independent countries.

The Serbian battle strategy, drafted in Belgrade and disseminated to the far-flung top ranks, is to refuse to acknowledge Yugoslavia’s successor nations and stage an armed rebellion to restore Serbian control.

“I’m not giving up Yugoslavia. My country extends from Triglav to Gevgelija!” the colonel tells Western visitors, referring to the northernmost mountain in independent Slovenia and the southern extreme of Macedonia, which is widely accepted as sovereign despite Greek objections to its use of that name.

Convinced that they have right on their side, local commanders like Lisica have responded to the nationalist battle cries of Milosevic and his political proxies in Bosnia and Croatia who have declared independent enclaves and sought to strengthen their hold on them by expelling non-Serbs.

Serb-held territory in Bosnia is now referred to by its conquerors as the Serbian Republic, for which Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is attempting to win recognition among Western mediators.

Serbian warlords took one-third of Croatia during a six-month war there in 1991, and 70% of Bosnia fell to them during the first few months of the current conflict.

But the rebel campaign for an expanded Serbia has lately ground to a halt because of increasing food and fuel shortages brought on by U.N. sanctions imposed last May to discourage Belgrade from bankrolling further Bosnian assaults.

Unable to feed or house their own people in areas they have had to destroy to control, regional commanders like Lisica have appealed to Western aid agencies for help.

Mendiluce notes that the mission of U.N. refugee officials is to help victims regardless of their political allegiances, so his agency is contemplating stepped-up relief shipments despite the Serbian forces’ concerted attempts to block aid from reaching Muslim and Croatian communities elsewhere.

Humanitarian relief officials are opposed to using aid as political leverage, Mendiluce says, deferring to U.N. and other Western mediators to pressure the warring factions into negotiating an end to the violence.

One plan, six months in the making under the guidance of U.N. negotiator Cyrus R. Vance and the European Community’s Lord Owen, would partition Bosnia into 10 provinces and parcel them out for Serbian, Croatian and Slavic Muslim control.

Under the Vance-Owen plan, Derventa and hundreds of square miles of Serb-held territory in the region would be destined for Croatian government.

But the slim prospects for breaking the Serbian grip on an area so thoroughly “cleansed” of other ethnic groups are obvious to any visitor to the area and defiantly opposed by the warlords in charge.

“Nothing is possible if it is not natural,” Lisica insists in rejecting the Vance-Owen plan because it would require Serbs to relinquish about half of the territory they have already conquered.

Neither will Croats and Muslims be allowed to return to Serb-held areas of Bosnia, Lisica says, because “too many bad things happened to the Serbian people here.”

The Serbian population that accounted for about 36% of the former Yugoslav federation’s 24 million people will settle for nothing less than the country they used to control, Lisica says.

“I don’t allow anyone to say ‘former Yugoslavia.’ It offends me,” the colonel tells those who try to avoid inciting him with the name “Bosnia.”

Vowing to press on with the war until all that he feels belongs to the Serbs is under their rule, Lisica predicts: “There will be Yugoslavia again. It’s just a question of when.”