Suddenly, sniper bullets spit into the dirt along the top of the trench. Down below the ridge, plum orchards in spring bloom conceal the Muslim lines. Exploding artillery shells trigger small avalanches along the rain-loosened earth walls. A young Serb slides into the trench, out of breath from his dash across a meadow of buttercups pocked by mortar craters. He has a question to ask that is important enough to risk his life. "Why does the world want to destroy us?" he wants to know. "We are victims too."
The fighters call this the "bicycle path," a narrow strip of bitterly contested ground cutting for nearly 150 miles through north central Bosnia to connect the Serb stronghold of Doboj to Serbia proper. Muslim and Croat lines ) pinch the corridor on both its eastern and western flanks. Daily shelling empties the town much of the day; by early afternoon the only sound on the main boulevard is the flapping of plastic sheets that cover shop windows shattered by artillery rounds. But when dusk closes in, fighters and young girls venture out to meet at a small park, whispering beneath the pine trees festooned with white paper death notices hung where friends might see them.
"If Doboj falls, the corridor will fall too. This is the most critical part of the line," says the local Serb commander. "We will never give it up." Under the Vance-Owen peace plan, Doboj (pronounced dough boy) would be handed back to the Muslims, an event that the Serbs insist will never happen. "This is our last stand," says a Serb who came here a year ago as a refugee from a Muslim town in southern Bosnia. "To take away the corridor is to kill us as a people. We would rather die fighting here."
It is in places like the slit trenches around Doboj that the success of any peace effort will be determined. Officers and men alike declare they would consider any concessions a betrayal. They will fight to the last man rather than give up one foot of the ground they have won. In an eerie way, the Serbs in Doboj are not unlike the Branch Davidians in Waco, devotees of a cult of victimization: isolated from the outside world, hunkered down against forces that want to remove them, certain of their beliefs. Like the Branch Davidians, they are ready for Armageddon if it comes. But they will not be moved.
These men are no freak sect, out of touch with the Serb mainstream. They are the mainstream. The deputies of the Bosnian Serbs' self-appointed parliament proved that last week: they showed the same intransigence as the men in the trenches when they effectively rejected the Vance-Owen plan. No matter that the bosses from Belgrade coaxed, wheedled, pleaded and finally threatened; the deputies rudely turned their backs on compromise. Their bellicose stance was a rebuke not only to the meddling international community but also to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who dared urge them to accept the plan.
Like the fighters in the field, the self-styled parliamentarians saw acceptance of the U.N.-mediated accord as an act of capitulation to a worldwide coalition set on annihilating the Serbian nation. "If we accept," said Radoslav Brdjanin, an ultra-nationalist leader of Banja Luka, "it means ) we fought for nothing and sacrificed the lives of our young needlessly. It is better to have an occupation by the Americans than be forced to live in a Muslim state."