Vance-Owen Plan Victim of Talks on Bosnia Peace

ZAGREB, Croatia —  Croatian President Franjo Tudjman said Thursday that Serbian leaders have agreed to make “significant territorial concessions” in drafting a new peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina as international mediators admitted the failure of their earlier proposal for easing the embattled republic’s ethnic divisions.

“These talks brought all sides closer to some solution which promises to lessen the number of victims and which is closer to peace,” Tudjman said of his talks in Geneva with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic. “We did not find any final solution, but in principle we agreed to what way we can look for a solution.”

He denied that Croatia and Serbia are preparing to divide the war-torn republic between them.

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, the European Community’s mediator, British diplomat Lord Owen, appeared resigned to the idea of organizing Bosnia around a confederation of three ethnic units of Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

The Bosnian government rejected the proposal that, Izetbegovic predicted, would lead to “a new round of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ ”

Izetbegovic, traveling to Germany to press for an end to the arms embargo for his government’s forces, added: “We are mixed, we are all intermingled there. You cannot draw the lines between us, unless you are ready to make a new round of ethnic cleansing, and I’m afraid that it would be that.” But Owen conceded that the new proposal might be the only workable resolution to the 15-month-old war.

“There is a tiredness of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I think most people believe we’ve got to bring this to an end with as much honor as possible,” said Owen, who, together with former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, acting as mediator for the United Nations, authored a peace plan that would establish 10 semiautonomous provinces divided among the ethnic groups.

That plan, until now nominally the long-term goal of the international community, appears to have died in the face of Serbian rejection and global inaction.

Owen, effectively pronouncing the obsequies over his plan, said: “There won’t be anywhere near the sort of settlement that I would have ideally liked. But I am a realist and we have to live with what has happened on the ground.”

At a press conference in Washington, President Clinton said that if the Bosnians end up agreeing to the partition plan, the United States must consider accepting it.

“My preference was for a multiethnic state in Bosnia, but if the parties, including the Bosnian government, agree, genuinely and honestly agree, to a different solution, the United States would have to look at it seriously,” he said.

In Bosnia, on the eve of a general cease-fire scheduled to take effect at noon today, U.N. monitors who for the first time reached the Muslim enclave of Gorazde in the eastern part of the republic reported an end to the Serbian shelling that has besieged the city and which Sarajevo radio said killed 91 people on Wednesday alone.

But fighting reportedly continued outside the city and the damage inside was said to be substantial.

Conducting a survey of the eastern section of the enclave designated by the U.N. Security Council as one of six safe areas for Muslims, international monitors found 40% of the houses destroyed and all other houses with minor or major damage.

“The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina is complex and disturbing and involves many, many villages and their civilian populations who are bearing the brunt of the intensification of military activity,” U.N. spokeswoman Shannon Boyd told reporters in Zagreb.

Tudjman said it was the escalating violence of the war and the international community’s failure to intervene to impose the Vance-Owen peace plan that drew leaders of the former Yugoslav federation back to the table this week with their own proposals.

Bosnian Muslims fear that process will lead to an agreement between Serbia and Croatia at the expense of the Muslims and a pluralistic Bosnian state.

Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic, speaking in Vienna where he is attending a U.N.-sponsored human rights conference, called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. General Assembly “to prevent the dismemberment of a U.N. member.”

Silajdzic said that, with the Vance-Owen plan abandoned, the “drawing of the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina was yesterday handed over to the perpetrators of one of the most horrible crimes in history. . . . Maps are now being drawn by people who killed 200,000 people.”

But Tudjman blamed the international community for the death of the Vance-Owen plan. “If the international community showed the decisiveness to undertake the steps to establish peace, then such negotiations wouldn’t be needed,” he said. “But since this was not the case, the only remaining option we have is to talk and negotiate.”

Tudjman outlined a plan that would establish Muslim territory in central Bosnia around Sarajevo, the capital, and to the north and northwest around Tuzla and Zenica. Croatia, for its part, has offered the Muslims access to the Adriatic Sea at the port of Ploce, he said.

Tudjman said the talks did not constitute an agreement between Serbia and Croatia, and emphasized the need to protect the interests of Bosnian Muslims, whose territory under the evolving plan would include half of Bosnia’s industry.

The Croatian president said the Serbs showed a willingness to give up land for peace.

“I must say openly that Serb representatives in these talks, most probably pressed by the international mood, sanctions, and the absurdity of continuing the war, agreed on significant territorial concessions,” he said.

Milosevic, the Serb leader, also was upbeat about the talks. “We’re approaching a settlement that will equally respect the interests of all three nations,” he told Belgrade TV.

Diplomatic and political analysts said Bosnia is feeling its own powerlessness to halt the ambitions of neighboring Serbia and Croatia.

“They’re splitting Bosnia, and basically the Muslims are out of the loop,” said one political analyst in Zagreb. “A three-way split-up of Bosnia basically means a two-way split, because nobody’s going to be able to defend a Muslim state.”

And the big remaining question was whether the Bosnian government would accept the emerging plan, as Owen strongly encouraged it to do, or go on fighting.

“How is it going to end? Bosnia can basically be destroyed two ways. The first is militarily, and the second is to sign our own death by negotiation,” said a Muslim journalist familiar with the Bosnian government’s thinking. “Tudjman and Milosevic are basically trying to finish the job.”

The three factions are scheduled to meet again next Wednesday to discuss the powers of Bosnia’s central government and the boundaries of the ethnic provinces.