Croats Ready to Give Up Battered Vukovar : Yugoslavia: Republic asks for talks to save civilians trapped there. The action comes after an 86-day siege.

Surrounded and fearful of a massacre, Croatian fighters in the devastated city of Vukovar asked Sunday to negotiate a surrender but were told that they must give in to Serbian-led forces unconditionally.

In the Croatian capital of Zagreb, officials conceded that the Vukovar forces have been defeated after a three-month battle with the Yugoslav army and Serbian guerrillas that by some estimates took more than 1,000 lives.

Although the fate of an estimated 12,000 to 14,000 people hiding in Vukovar’s basements and bomb shelters remains uncertain, Zagreb’s admission that the city has been conquered marked Croatia’s greatest loss in nearly five months of civil war.

“The biggest part of the town is in army hands,” Croatian Information Ministry spokesman Kresimir Macan told reporters. “There cannot be any military way now for Croatia to save Vukovar. We are just trying to save civilians.”

The official Tanjug news agency in Belgrade reported that desperate Croatian national guardsmen had asked shortly after noon to discuss terms of a surrender to spare the lives of 2,000 children and nearly 10,000 other civilians trapped in Vukovar. But the agency said an army captain rejected the call for peace talks and said the estimated 1,500 Croatian fighters still in the city were to surrender without conditions.

The head of Croatian forces in Vukovar reported two weeks ago that 14,000 people were still holed up in the besieged city, including 500 wounded fighters and civilians in the basement of the shattered hospital.

Vukovar, once a thriving city of more than 50,000 in the heart of the Croatian corn belt, has been reduced to rubble by an 86-day siege that both sides saw as a turning point in the civil war.

Belgrade television footage in recent days has shown an eerie ghost town of roofless houses, corpses strewn on fields and roadways and home interiors looted by the advancing Serbian militants, some inscribing the few remaining walls with declarations that the eastern Croatian region “is and always will be Serbia!”

The city has been the seat of fierce resistance by Croats bent on secession from the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav federation. Serbs want Vukovar as the center of a region they have otherwise conquered and hope to annex to the republic of Serbia.

No official death toll has been released for Vukovar or for the civil war in general, but informed sources estimate that at least 7,000 have been killed throughout Croatia since the republic, along with neighboring Slovenia, declared independence June 25.

“We are asking the International Red Cross for help,” Macan told reporters in Zagreb. “We are calling for international intervention. We hope that international pressure may safeguard lives.”

Croatian Information Minister Branko Salaj appealed to the federal army to handle the surrender, suggesting that Croatia fears that the unruly Serbian irregulars fighting alongside the federal troops might exact a bloody revenge for the deadly Vukovar standoff.

“If the (Serbian guerrillas) come in, there is the possibility of a slaughter on a large scale,” Salaj said.

Earlier Sunday, the Serbian and federal forces hoisted Serbian flags in the nearby village of Borovo Naselje after conquering the last pocket of Croatian resistance in the area around Vukovar.

The final army assaults on Borovo Naselje and Vukovar came amid a cease-fire signed in Zagreb on Friday.

A spokesman for the European Community monitoring team in Zagreb, Ed Koestal, said that the army advance on Vukovar is a violation of the cease-fire whether or not shots were fired.

The cease-fire--the 13th brokered by EC diplomats--was intended as a first step to facilitate deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force to separate the combatants in the Serb-Croat war.

However, Western diplomats have said that such a deployment could not be arranged unless a cease-fire held firmly for at least two months.

Aside from the reported violations in Vukovar, Croatian Radio said that at least 50 mortar shells were fired into the Adriatic port of Zadar after the cease-fire went into effect at 6 p.m. Saturday and that the city of Osijek, near Vukovar, had also been under attack.

Elsewhere in Croatia, fighting was reported to have subsided, including that in the historic walled port of Dubrovnik, which had been under federal and Serbian attack since Oct. 1.

Authorities in Belgrade announced that they would permit an Italian ship carrying food and medicine to dock in Dubrovnik, deliver its humanitarian aid and possibly evacuate civilians.

The last previous evacuation vessel permitted into Dubrovnik was stormed by terrified women, children and elderly residents trying to flee the rain of shells and artillery fire. Federal warships have imposed a blockade against all Croatian ports, and infantry and Serbian irregulars have fired on the once-resplendent tourist center of Dubrovnik from the surrounding hills.

Nearly 50,000 people have taken refuge behind the towering stone walls of Dubrovnik, recognized internationally as a cultural treasure, because the surrounding communities have been destroyed by six weeks of federal siege.

Free-lance journalist Danica Kirka in Zagreb contributed to this report.