Combatants in Bosnia Sign 14-Day Truce

In what has been heralded by mediators as a chance for peace in ravaged Bosnia-Herzegovina, Muslim, Serbian and Croatian leaders signed a cease-fire accord in London on Friday and agreed to place their heavy weapons under United Nations supervision.

Bosnia’s warring factions have signed numerous short-lived truces since a Serbian uprising began in April, but Britain’s Lord Carrington, who negotiated the latest agreement for a 14-day truce, told reporters he is more optimistic than usual because the combatants agreed to surrender their hardware.

In another development that could dampen Serbian enthusiasm for the increasingly deadly fight, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd announced during a visit to Sarajevo that there will be no negotiation over the republic’s internationally recognized borders.

Serbian rebels have conquered about two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina over the past four months, driving out nearly 2 million Muslims and Croats in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” aimed at securing the territory for Serbs.

The Serbs’ armed march across northern Bosnia and a deadly three-month siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, are believed to have been inspired and bankrolled by Belgrade in a bid to create a Greater Serbia by seizing the territory that separates Serbia from Serb-occupied areas of Croatia.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been pressing European Community mediators to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into ethnic cantons, with the objective of linking the Serb-controlled territory to the new Yugoslav federation that includes only Serbia and Montenegro.

A Croatian militia leader, Mate Boban, also supports the ethnic partitioning of the republic, against the wishes of the larger Muslim community, which wants to preserve a unified state.

Muslims are Bosnia’s largest ethnic group, with 44% of what was a population of 4.4 million before war broke out. As they have no other republic to unify with, they have continued to advocate integration and ethnic tolerance and have steadfastly resisted the Serbian and Croatian plans for carving up Bosnia between them.

Britain holds the rotating chairmanship of the 12-nation European Community through the end of the year, so Hurd’s rejection of border changes in Bosnia will deal a major setback to the Serbian and Croatian expansionists.

“We are not going to accept the partition of Bosnia,” Hurd told the British Broadcasting Corp. during his short visit to rubble-strewn Sarajevo. He added that any political settlement would have to recognize the territorial integrity of the republic that endorsed independence from Yugoslavia in a Feb. 29 referendum and won international recognition of its sovereignty five weeks later.

In London, Carrington told reporters at a news conference that the agreement to cease hostilities for two weeks was the first under which all Bosnian combatants promised to put their combat aircraft, rocket launchers and other heavy equipment under U.N. surveillance.

“I think that it is encouraging that all three parties, not just the Serbs . . . have agreed to this provision,” Carrington said.

However, the Serbs are the only faction with aircraft, and the tanks and artillery they inherited from the former Yugoslav People’s Army vastly outnumber the outdated weaponry of the Muslims and Croats.

While Carrington expressed guarded optimism over the latest cease-fire, which is to take effect at 6 p.m. Sunday, European monitors closer to the action said they have lost the ability to put any faith in such agreements.

“These warlords have repeatedly signed their names to cease-fires with no intention of honoring them, only of buying themselves time,” an EC diplomat in the Adriatic port of Split said of the Serbian and Croatian leaders in Bosnia. “It’s a very sinister game they are playing.”

Officials have confirmed at least 7,500 Bosnian deaths--mostly Muslim civilians--since early April, and they say that the actual death toll is probably at least 40,000.

The practice of ethnic cleansing that both Serbs and Croats have engaged in has swelled the Yugoslav refugee wave to nearly 3 million, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. That is the largest civilian displacement in Europe since World War II.

The agreement signed in London also calls for the return of all Bosnian refugees to their homes and for further negotiations on the republic’s future administration, which is to commence July 27.

In evidence of the continuing frictions among the three communities’ leaders, Karadzic, Boban and Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic, who is Muslim, did not meet together but communicated through messages conveyed through Carrington’s deputy, Jose Cutiliero of Portugal.

Fighting continued throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the extreme east and south of Croatia during the London peace talks. The Belgrade-based Tanjug news agency said Serbian irregulars besieging the eastern Bosnian town of Gorazde, where 70,000 Muslim civilians are trapped, had given the captives 24 hours to release any Serbs left in the city.

Karadzic had ordered Serbian fighters to cease their assault on Gorazde two days earlier.

One shell fired from Serbian positions overlooking Sarajevo landed only a few hundred feet from the office of Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic while Hurd was meeting with him inside the building.

Croatian army officials reported that two French soldiers assigned to the U.N. peace force in Croatia were killed Friday by a land mine explosion near the Adriatic port of Zadar. They were the first U.N. soldiers killed in the Balkans fighting.

At the United Nations, meanwhile, the Security Council welcomed the London accord and began preparations to bolster its 1,600-person peacekeeping force in Bosnia.

Times staff writer Art Pine in Washington contributed to this report.