Seeking Comfort : The war in Bosnia has drawn together county refugees and immigrants from the former Yugoslav federation as they do their best to cope.

For about a year now, the Primer family has been riveted to the television.

Death counts from their disintegrating homeland of Bosnia drone on inside their Mission Viejo apartment. They flip on the electronic images of destruction upon awakening each morning and shut off the talking heads just before going to bed. Even their 2-year-old daughter Andrea’s bright blue eyes recognize the ever-present CNN Headline News on the screen.

“If we don’t watch TV, we are reading the newspaper or talking on the telephone or writing a letter,” explains Vesna Primer, 30, who grew up in Bosnia and now, thousands of miles from home, remains gripped by the crisis there. “All the time we are in this war.”

“Every time I turn on TV, I hope there’ll be good news--like war is over, or somebody is coming to help, or something like that, but it doesn’t happen,” blurts her husband, Dubravko Primer. “I’m sick of watching TV.”

Enzada (Ann) Selimovic, a Bosnian-born Muslim who lives in Anaheim Hills, feels the same way. Since returning from a monthlong mission to Croatia in February, Selimovic has tried to concentrate on the red roses in her back yard.

“I keep very busy . . . just to keep my mind off the war,” Selimovic said. “In the beginning, whatever article came in the newspaper or Time magazine, I used to cut it out and put it in plastic. . . . It gets to you after a while.”

The war in Bosnia has drawn together Orange County refugees and immigrants from the former Yugoslav federation--be they Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian; Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. They are bonded closest with those who share their backgrounds, but as they watch the country they love fall apart, immigrants from the former Yugoslav federation living here try not to separate themselves based on ethnicity.

The center of this new community is not a restaurant, not a church, not a neighborhood or a specific organization. It is, simply, the war itself.

When one person speaks to relatives abroad, the news zips across local telephone lines. They gather for coffee to gossip in their native tongue. They raise money to send food, clothing and medicine to the battleground. They politic. They argue. Often, they cry.

“It’s almost like group therapy,” said Hilda Foley of North Tustin, who spends most days writing letters to legislators and diplomats around the world. “You’re together with others, you’re kind of leaning on each other during the darkest days.”

Eric Dzinovic, 47, a Muslim from Sarajevo who now lives in Aliso Viejo and who is involved with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian-American Cultural Assn., said that since the war started, “we are all the time looking for Bosnians.”

“We have people coming from all over and they know where to find us,” he said. “You always find friends.”

Those active in the community guess that there are thousands of Bosnians in Orange County, and thousands more Serbs and Croats from other parts of the former Yugoslav federation as well.

Many grew up in America, having fled Communist rule with their parents after World War II. Others have drifted to the United States over the intervening decades to pursue their education or capitalize on career opportunities. Some are stuck here, having come for a visit before the fighting broke out last spring, but are now unable to return.

Their relatives remain across the ocean, caught in the seemingly endless battles. Most already have lost friends and relatives to starvation or shelling. All have seen the cities they knew destroyed.

Before the war, these Yugoslavs had little contact with one another. But over the past 12 months, they have formed relief organizations, gathered for massive cultural celebrations, met at round-table discussions on college campuses and in front of cable TV cameras. Some have built a ham-radio network to contact relatives abroad.

“You feel some kind of obligation to help in some way,” explained Sekib Sokolovich, 35, a Sarajevo Muslim who has lived in California for 12 years. “You cannot just stand here and go to the swimming pool, you cannot live here a normal life when your country is (being annihilated). You’ve got to do something.”

For Dr. Berigot K. Stambuk, who lives in San Clemente, that meant 12 hours on cleanup duty at a fund-raising picnic on a recent Sunday, and lobbying two Southern California congressmen at a dinner on a Monday. “The same garbage man one night was politicking the next night,” the 60-year-old physician said with a laugh. “This is the United States at its very best.”

Stambuk and about 200 others are members of the newly formed Croatian American Society of Orange County, which has raised about $50,000 over the past year. Various ethnic groups have combined their efforts for the Bosnian Relief Fund, a Costa Mesa-based group that has sent several containers of humanitarian aid to the war zone. The Bosnian-Herzegovinian-American Cultural Assn. is another mixed-ethnic group that backs up the fund raising with political and cultural education.

The Croatian group is the most organized, with monthly board meetings in the back room of a flower store plastered with nationalistic symbols--”Parking for Croatians only, all others will be towed,” says one sign.

At their meetings, the war in the former Yugoslav republics is ever present.

When one member suggests establishing a Croatian investment group and another dreams of building a clubhouse, the table teems with excitement over their emerging cultural community. Then they stop.

“We should probably do that after the war,” cautioned Linda Hurley, 42. “After there is no necessity in Croatia.”

Sandra Horo, 24, a Sarajevo native who is now studying math at Saddleback College, does not belong to any group. Still, she has sought out residents of her war-torn city.

“We shared a lot of things in common, just coming from there and the way we are connected to our city, the way that everything is destroyed and our parents built it,” Horo said. “We sit and talk about: ‘Oh, I remember that place.’

“When (my friend) gets a telephone call from her parents (in Sarajevo), it’s a happy day for both of us. . . . When I get a letter, the first thing I do is call her,” explained Horo, whose father is Muslim and mother is Serbian. “We get together and make the food and we talk and play guitar and sing the songs.”

Jasmin Miftarevic, a Bosnian who is half Muslim and half Croatian, met Bianca Childs, a Croatian from Zagreb, at a Laguna Beach bar a few months back. He queried her about her accent, and soon they were chatting away in “our language,” she recalled.

“It feels good,” said Childs, who has lived in America for 10 years. “It brings memories back.”

Like others, Miftarevic said the fighting in Bosnia has made him more nationalistic and left him craving contact with his compatriots.

“I’ve always considered myself Yugoslavian, but now I am Croatian,” said the 30-year-old Laguna Niguel resident, who came to the United States in 1991 as a tourist, but has remained because of the war. “They (the Serbian government) did that.”

“Yugoslavia was my country,” agreed Alexander Zigic, a Serb from Belgrade who ostensibly should be on the “other side” from Miftarevic. “We were always brought up with brotherhood and unity. It’s not easy to erase that from your head.”

While many Americans view the former Yugoslav federation as being made up of distinct ethnic enclaves, those from Bosnia and its surroundings say their background is far more complex.

The Primers, for example, are a “typical” couple: Dubravko’s mother is Croatian, his father Serbian, but both spent their whole lives in Bosnia; Vesna’s mother is Serbian, her father Muslim, but they, too, grew up in the Bosnian village of Tuzla.

Which leaves Andrea, the blue-eyed 2-year-old who knows to be quiet whenever Bosnian news comes on her family’s television screen, a mix of all three warring factions.

“Even though I feel Yugoslavian, I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to be part of this Yugoslavia today,” Dubravko Primer said when asked his ethnic identity. “I am Bosnian. Just Bosnian. Not Bosnian Serb or Bosnian Muslim--just Bosnian.”

The war has created bonds among Bosnians, but it has also driven wedges between old friends from the old country.

Since leaving Zagreb in 1952, Foley, who is Croatian, has corresponded regularly with a Serb who lives in Florida--until last spring.

“Ever since, she hasn’t written to me and I haven’t written to her,” said Foley, 65, smoothing the off-white tunic dress she crafted from a Croatian tablecloth. “It broke up a lifelong friendship.”

Some Croatians, like Bianca Childs, say they are afraid of their Serbian neighbors: “I don’t want to talk to them. I know what they are doing to my country, to my people. I’m afraid what they’ll do to me.”

Maryann Zovak, a leader of the Croatian cultural society, thinks she has reason to be fearful. Last April, vandals removed her nationalistic “CRO” bumper sticker and left it on her windshield--along with a note filled with obscenities in English and Serbo-Croatian.

Most Bosnians, though, try not to replicate the war here.

“In Yugoslavia, we lived next door to each other,” said Natasha Orloff, a Serb who left Bosnia 22 years ago and now lives in Stanton. “I can’t turn around and say because you are a Croatian or because you are a Muslim, I don’t like you. It doesn’t work that way. I do feel tension when politics come up, so we try not to talk about it.”

Selimovic keeps in touch with her Serbian friends, but tension is inevitable. “I see them and I say ‘Hello,’ and they say ‘Hello,’ ” she said. “But you can feel that they are afraid to ask you anything. They are afraid to say anything.”

Vesna Primer says she is always scared.

As she watches the perennial TV news, she is afraid. As she calls her parents each Saturday night with the help of a Croatian ham radio operator, she is afraid. Even when she sleeps, she is afraid. Many nights, the Primers said, Vesna wakes up Dubravko after dreaming that her baby, Andrea, is caught in the war.