COLUMN ONE : In Croatia, the Enemy Next Door : Once neighbors, the Svilars and the Gujas haven’t met. But they share a tragic inheritance--an ethnic enmity that has sparked a civil war in Yugoslavia.

VUKOVAR, Croatia — Like the Hatfields and the McCoys or the Capulets and Montagues, the Svilars and the Gujas inherited the ancient hatred that was to bring about their mutual destruction.

But in a tragedy eclipsing many of the most infamous feuds of history and legend, the shared suffering of these Serbian and Croatian families seems destined to perpetuate their conflict rather than to inspire them to settle it.

A year ago, the Serbian Svilars and the Croatian Gujas were equally comfortable and prosperous in Vukovar, which then was a pleasant valley of fertile farmland and flowering chestnut trees along the Danube River.

Today, the families are equally destitute. Their city has been reduced to ruin--the only signs of life are thundering military vehicles and patrolling troops. The Svilars and Gujas share the misery of the more than 1 million other refugees from the Yugoslav conflict and a conviction that Serbs and Croats will never inhabit the same streets again.

“How could I ever again live with these people who destroyed everything I had?” asks Vera Guja, an emaciated cancer victim holed up in a Zagreb hotel room with two teen-age children, her husband and his aged parents.

Stojan Svilar, who has moved to Belgrade with his wife and daughter to live with a widowed sister, observes: “There is a huge quantity of hate now. We couldn’t imagine ever again living in an area controlled by Croatia.”

In an irony as bitter as the civil war in which they were reluctantly drafted, the families, who do not know each other, hold identical views. They agree that the armed conflict has resolved nothing, ethnic intolerance has led to their ruin and the centuries-old differences that brought them to battle can be resolved only through peaceful negotiation.

They also express the same worry that the worst of the conflict is not over and that the fighting now consuming Bosnia-Herzegovina could revisit their hometown as soon as refugees dare to go back and rebuild.

The past year’s violence has embittered all Yugoslav ethnic groups, causing one people to blame their suffering on the others. And although both Serbs and Croats in Vukovar have been damaged by the same events, they see the war’s single reality through different nationalist prisms. Both the Svilars and the Gujas harbor distorted views and selective memories of what has happened.

Ask the Gujas how the war started and they accuse Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic of raw aggression in a determined plot to take coveted territory by driving out non-Serbs.

The Svilars contend that it was the spring, 1990, revival of Croatian nationalism that divided the communities, threatening to make Serbs a repressed minority in what they consider a fascist state.

Who destroyed their homes? The Gujas say unequivocally that it was the Serbian-led federal army; the Svilars say Serbian houses were wrecked by Croats before the army managed to force them out.

With such conflicting accounts from Serbs and Croats of the events that have reduced them to beggars, outsiders often find it difficult to sort truth from fiction, propaganda from genuine fear.

But here are the versions of the tragedy of Vukovar as presented by two groups of its victims:

THE SVILARS

Stojan Svilar, 44, worked as a buyer of spare parts for the tire-producing section of the Borovo manufacturing complex near the pleasant brick house he built in the Vukovar suburb of Borovo Naselje 20 years ago.

His wife, Nada, also worked at Borovo, the main employer in the region of family farms and light industry. Their daughter, Maja, 20, was attending a teachers college in nearby Osijek, the provincial capital of ethnically mixed eastern Croatia.

“I had friends from all spheres,” says Nada, who looks dazed by her family’s misfortunes. “Until about two years ago, no one paid any attention to who was Serb and who was Croat.”

Tensions began to surface just before Croatia’s first multi-party elections in the spring of 1990, Stojan says. After the Croatian Democratic Union headed by former Communist Gen. Franjo Tudjman came to power, nationalist cells formed around Vukovar, and Serbian police and government workers began losing their jobs.

“Pictures of Tudjman and Croatian flags began going up everywhere, and people began celebrating Croatian national holidays in public and buying weapons,” Maja recalls. “At school, it became unbearable. They insisted on a purely Croatian language for my exams, and I was forced to write a paper on the role of language in preserving Croatian national identity. I didn’t try to express my opposition because it would have affected my grades.”

Nada says longtime Croatian friends began omitting Serbs from social gatherings and forming cliques that excluded her at work.

The Svilars say ethnic relations soured to outright hostility in January, 1991, after Belgrade television--received in Vukovar--broadcast a film produced by the Yugoslav army. The film purported to show Croatian Defense Minister Martin Spegelj plotting the assassination of Serbian officers and their families in the event that the army invaded Croatia to deter its secession.

After a Croatian policeman was killed last April in a clash with Serbian rebels in Plitvice Lakes National Park in southern Croatia, Serbs in other ethnically mixed areas barricaded their communities in fear of retaliation, Stojan explains.

No-Man’s-Land

The Serbian roadblocks prompted Croats to seal off the areas in which they were a majority, and the Svilars found themselves living in the dangerous no-man’s-land between rival checkpoints manned round-the-clock by armed nationalists.

“One neighbor I’ve known for years told me right to my face that not a single Serb would get by him alive. It got so that we couldn’t sleep at night,” says Stojan, explaining why he moved his family to Belgrade early last July, when the Borovo factory closed for its annual three-week holiday.

According to the Svilars, the factory never reopened because the situation around Vukovar was too tense. They say they were unable to get to their home again until the city fell to the federal army Nov. 18.

Five days later, they drove into vanquished Vukovar to find a pile of rubble where their home had stood.

“It took us the past 20 years to build that house. It held everything we had worked for,” Stojan says. “Everything inside of it had been stolen before it was ruined.”

“We had just put in new appliances before the trouble began,” adds Nada, verging on tears. “The kitchen was finally the way I had wanted.”

Theoretically, the spacious house, garage and garden shack could be rebuilt, because the Svilars own their land and Serbia now controls the region. But last year’s fighting destroyed the economy and set a hyper-inflationary juggernaut in motion that has prices climbing at a dizzying 100,000% annual rate.

No Job Prospects

Maja transferred her studies to Belgrade, but neither of her parents has even a remote prospect of finding a job.

“We’re living off the hospitality of my sister, but we can’t do this forever,” says Stojan, who concedes that even his sister’s meager pension could be endangered because the government is virtually bankrupt. “We would like to rebuild our home, but there is no electricity or water (in Vukovar), and without a job or wages, there are no conditions for starting over.”

The Serbian government is unable to care for its war victims, and refugees like the Svilars are increasingly resented in cities like Belgrade, where the social costs of last year’s fighting have only recently begun to show. Serbs are even less welcome in most other former Yugoslav republics, which blame Serbia for provoking the war.

The Svilars blame Croatian nationalism for sparking the conflict. They stand behind Milosevic, whom they consider a devoted leader but one destined to be swept aside by Serbia’s approaching political chaos.

“I’m furious,” concludes Stojan, who looks more dejected than angry. “This war hasn’t resolved anything at all. It was senseless. We still have to negotiate a solution, and that could have been done without so much killing.”

The future is a forbidding subject, and the Svilars say only that they are pessimistic.

“It’s impossible to make any plans for the future under such uncertain conditions,” says a fearful Nada.

Stojan adds, morosely, “It’s important just to survive each night.”

THE GUJAS

Karol and Vera Guja also worked at the Borovo complex, although Vera was forced to take a disability leave two years ago when she was diagnosed as having uterine cancer.

Like the Svilars, they had built their own home and equipped it with the usual suburban comforts--a VCR, color televisions, a small boat and camper parked in the yard.

Their children, Karla, 18, and Goran, 14, attended local schools as ethnically mixed as their Vukovar suburb.

The trouble began, according to Vera, because Serbian propaganda poisoned their neighbors against them.

“We watched Serbian television and read Serbian newspapers and were horrified by what was said,” says Vera, who at 34 is ghostly thin from ill health and her family’s ordeal. “They kept telling Serbs that Croats would slaughter them. They wouldn’t even talk about it with us. They just believed it.”

Croats and other non-Serbs grew nervous when Serbs began evacuating their families during the summer holidays, depleting the local population.

“They considered all of us Ustashe,” says Karol, a 39-year-old ethnic Hungarian who, like most of non-Serbians in the region, defends Croatia. “They kept accusing us of having plucked people’s eyes out and cut their throats. They even accused fellow Serbs who didn’t side with them of being Ustashe.”

(The Ustasha, or uprising, was the name of Croatia’s Nazi puppet regime responsible for mass killing of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies during World War II.)

Mortars and Grenades

Once most Serbs had fled Vukovar--the Gujas believe that Belgrade warned Serbs of what was about to happen--federal army troops moved in and began pounding the city with grenades and mortars.

Some families fled the assault, but others took shelter in cellars and men took up arms to defend their homes. The Gujas and 12 friends lived together in a neighbor’s basement for four months, braving artillery barrages to fetch well water and food from their abandoned houses.

There was no bathroom in the basement, so the holdouts had to use chamber pots or venture outdoors during rare breaks in the shelling. During one such foray on Oct. 15, Vera’s mother was killed by a grenade and lay in the yard for three days before the rain of shells slowed enough for the family to bury her.

Like others who withstood the battle for Vukovar, until the city fell Nov. 18, the Gujas were flushed out of the cellar by federal troops and Serbian irregulars who went house to house lobbing grenades in basements after ordering all within to surrender.

Karol and his 64-year-old father were taken to prisoner-of-war camps, while Vera and the children--as well as Karol’s mother--were sent to a Serbian refugee station and later allowed to go to the home of a distant relative in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Because Vukovar families put up such a defiant defense, the soldiers were brutal with their prisoners, says Karol, recalling how he witnessed the victors cut the throats of three captives and take another group behind a building and shoot them.

“There were a lot of personal conflicts being settled. If they knew you were HDZ (members of the Croatian Democratic Union), they just killed you,” says Karol, who was stripped and made to lie on a bare concrete floor for 10 days after his capture.

He and his father, who was better-treated because of his age, were released in a Serb-Croat prisoner exchange three days before Christmas.

From Shelter to Shelter

The family met in Zagreb, where they have roamed from one shelter to another ever since.

“I would like to go back to Vukovar more than anything in the world. Zagreb means nothing to me,” says Vera, waving in dismissive fashion around the dreary hotel room.

“But we will go back only if there is a Croatian government there,” Karol says, completing his tearful wife’s thought. “If the government is Krajina (a self-proclaimed Serbian region), there is no chance for the rest of us to go back. . . . A lot of Serbs have been settled in Croatian houses in the villages around Vukovar, and who is going to drive them out?”

The younger Gujas, who declare themselves Croatian despite their father’s Hungarian roots, are even more convinced than their parents that the rival ethnic groups will never live together again.

“The hatred has grown. We can’t go back to the old ways; we’ll have to try something different,” says Karla, a slight, pretty blonde whose ordeal has given her a hard edge.

Her home lost, probably forever, her last year of high school ruined and her future unclear, Karla says she could put it all behind her if not for the senseless killing of the grandmother she loved.

“Somebody always has to be the victim,” says Karla, dejected but philosophical. “It’s just hard when it has to be you.”