Serbian Militia Leader Offers Truce but Fighting Intensifies

Pressured by worldwide sanctions, the leader of Serbian militias in Bosnia proposed a cease-fire Friday and for the first time offered to let the United Nations monitor his forces.

A U.N. spokeswoman called Serbian leader Radovan Karadzic’s proposal “encouraging” and said about 1,000 peacekeepers are ready to go to Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, if a truce is called Monday as the Serb leader offered.

“We can only be encouraged by such a move,” said Barbara Shannon-Boyd, a U.N. spokeswoman in Belgrade. “It could be a basis for a possible peace.”

Diplomats believe Karadzic answers to President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, the dominant republic in what remains of the Yugoslav federation.

Despite Karadzic’s truce announcement, shelling and street fighting in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo intensified.

Local journalists said Serbian artillery bludgeoned several contested Sarajevo districts and that at least 12 people were killed, including a 12-year-old boy and an old woman who emerged from cellars to hunt for food.

“There is very heavy street fighting, in part due to counterattacks by Muslim and Croat territorial defenders. Many buildings are on fire,” Sarajevo Radio Editor Zoran Pirolic told Reuters news agency by telephone.

As the fighting raged, the U.S. Senate urged the United Nations to consider military intervention in Yugoslavia.

The Senate action came in a non-binding resolution passed by voice vote calling on President Bush to urge the Security Council to direct U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to provide a plan and a budget for military intervention that might be needed to enforce a cease-fire.

Before the vote, Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic told reporters in Washington: “I have come here to say there is no time left. Our hopes are here. Otherwise, we are going to have tens of thousands of people dead.”

About 5,700 people have died since Bosnian Serbs, aided by Yugoslav army troops, set out to crush majority Muslims and Croats who voted to secede from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia on Feb. 29. More than a dozen previous truces, including one unilaterally proclaimed by the Serbs, have collapsed.