A 10th Cease-Fire Called in Croatia : Yugoslavia: But while negotiators agree to a truce, the fighting, as usual, continues.

European mediators insisted Friday that there was no sense in talking peace in The Hague while war raged in Croatia. They demanded an immediate, unconditional cease-fire, and they got one.

It was the 10th such promise in a matter of weeks, declared by Serbian and Croatian negotiators as their warriors carried on with the fight.

The eastern Croatian city of Vukovar, cut off by a Yugoslav army cordon from the rest of the republic for more than a month, was under heavy artillery fire throughout the day, and federal and Serbian bombardment of Dubrovnik also continued.

Successive truce proclamations followed by more intense and deadly warfare have served only to discourage the few Western statesmen still trying to calm the turmoil at Europe’s southern border.

Even before the latest agreement to stop shooting could take effect as scheduled at 1 p.m. today, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had dismissed the European Community settlement proposal as unacceptable.

With the terms for a diplomatic solution already rejected, the cease-fire meant to create a breathing space for negotiation appeared doomed.

“Milosevic said that the proposed five principles (in the EC peace plan) practically meant the abolishment of Yugoslavia,” the official Tanjug news agency reported from The Hague, where weekly attempts have been made by Western intermediaries to end the war that has already killed more than 1,000 people.

Hopes had been slightly higher for positive results from the talks on Friday, as the full eight-man federal presidency and the leaders of all six Yugoslav republics had agreed to take part. Britain’s Lord Carrington, chairman of the EC mediation conference, had also laid out a take-it-or-leave-it proposal for bringing about peace.

A Dutch official told reporters in The Hague that Carrington had insisted on both Serbia and Croatia agreeing to a cease-fire before discussing his proposed settlement, which would effectively grant independence to all six Yugoslav republics in return for assurances of protection and full rights for ethnic minorities in each state.

Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman agreed to the truce, which called for an immediate lifting of Croatian blockades around federal army installations and a phased army withdrawal from Croatia.

But Milosevic refused to go along with the other five republic presidents in accepting Carrington’s plan for a loose union of sovereign states “as a basis for future discussion,” Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel told reporters in The Hague.

Serbia opposes independence for Croatia, contending that the rival republic’s 600,000 ethnic Serbs would be subjected to the kind of atrocities meted out by the fanatic Nazi quisling regime that ruled in an independent Croatia during World War II.

Croatian officials deny any fascist intentions in their drive for independence and have accused rival Serbia of reviving the wartime hysteria to cover up an aggressive land-grab.

More than one-third of Croatia has been seized by Serbian rebels--backed by the federal army whose officers corps is at least 70% Serbian--since Croatia and Slovenia declared independence June 25.

The army has made clear that it will not pull out of Croatia unless a settlement of the Yugoslav crisis is worked out to its liking.

That position has created a Catch-22 for those struggling to end the hostilities, as each cease-fire has demanded army withdrawal from the war-ravaged republic before serious talks on the overall crisis can begin.

While the republic leaders were meeting in The Hague, army and Croatian officials worked out a new plan for getting a medical relief convoy into Vukovar, which has been under constant attack and sealed off from the rest of Croatia for more than a month.

Deputy Croatian Defense Minister Stjepan Adamic said in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, that the two sides had agreed to halt shooting through the weekend.

But similar assurances were offered more than a week ago and four attempts since then have failed to bring the EC-escorted caravan of food and medicine into the besieged city.