Serb Using Grisly Film as Propaganda : Balkans: Warlord hopes scenes of alleged Muslim brutality will defuse outrage over atrocities blamed on his forces.

The Serbian warlord whose forces have seized 70% of Bosnia-Herzegovina through armed might and “ethnic cleansing” reached for the weapon of propaganda Friday to temper Western outrage over atrocities blamed on his rebels.

Radovan Karadzic, a Sarajevo psychiatrist who has masterminded the dismantling and conquest of much of Bosnia, released a highly dramatized and gut-wrenching film depicting decomposed and mutilated bodies that he called documentary evidence of Muslim massacres of Bosnian Serbs.

The 45-minute film, clearly aimed at discrediting the Muslim community that has been under Serbian siege since early April, will tell the Serbian side of the story to European and U.N. diplomats at a conference on the Balkans crisis in London next week, Karadzic told reporters at a press screening here.

The graphic film, featuring close-ups of bloated, headless corpses, stirred revulsion even among journalists already long familiar with the savagery of the year-old Yugoslav war. But its melodramatic presentation, unsubstantiated claims and demonization of Bosnia’s Slavic Muslims appeared to run the risk of backfiring by offending the very diplomats whose sympathies it aimed to win.

Accompanied by a Richard Wagner soundtrack that was also background music for the movie “Apocalypse Now,” a dead Serb purports to speak from the grave after his death, the audience is told, at the hands of barbaric Muslims.

“I was buried with a power shovel, like garbage,” the narrative voice claims, as the color film produced by Karadzic loyalists shows earthmoving equipment dredging a mangled, unidentifiable body out of a river.

“They have been stabbed and mutilated because they were Serbs,” the voice declares as a camera pans across maggot-ridden corpses. “How long will the Serbs have to die for their country and for their names?”

Although the film repeatedly describes some of the bodies as too mutilated or decomposed to be identified, Karadzic and another leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Nikola Koljevic, have said they know that all the victims shown in it are Serbs.

Serbs and the tenuous alliance of Muslims and Croats fighting in Bosnia have repeatedly accused each other of atrocities, and U.N. peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo say they have evidence of barbarism committed on all sides. But Western diplomats in what is left of Yugoslavia, aid agencies operating in the war-torn republic and human rights organizations have accused Serbian forces of instigating the violence and carrying out the lion’s share of war crimes.

The film and a recent spate of peaceful pronouncements by the Serbs appear aimed at dissuading Western governments from military intervention in the Bosnian crisis by presenting it as ancient tribal rivalry in which all parties are equally to blame.

Tens of thousands have been killed in five months of civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was the most integrated and ethnically tolerant of the old Yugoslavia’s six republics. As many as 2 million others--mostly Muslims and Croats--have been made homeless by the Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing,” which strives to cement Serbian control by expelling those of other ethnic backgrounds and then looting and burning their homes.

Recent media reports on civilian slaughter and mistreatment of prisoners at Serb-run detention camps have shocked the international community and prompted impassioned calls for foreign intervention to halt the bloodshed.

European Community foreign ministers, U.N. officials and other influential diplomats, such as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, are expected to weigh the options for military intervention, as well as define the West’s political objectives in the Balkans, at the international conference that convenes in London next week.

Fearing a harsh judgment, Karadzic and Serbian leaders in Belgrade have mixed veiled threats of a Europe-wide conflagration with promises of a new willingness to compromise in a campaign to deter intervention.

Officials of the federal and Serbian governments based in Belgrade have also hinted that Western intervention could trigger vengeful actions by Serbs, most of whom consider themselves blameless in the ethnic warfare that the Belgrade regime played a role in fomenting.

Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic, the Southern California pharmaceuticals czar who has been waging a highly publicized but so far ineffective campaign to curb the Balkans bloodshed, has made an unlikely appeal for the international community to give the combatants a clean slate.

“Who cares who is to blame? Why is the world so concerned with who started it?” Panic said of the war in Bosnia, contending that other forces are as responsible as his fellow Serbs.

Panic dismissed the recent televised reports of Serb-run internment camps as “the biggest propaganda in the world since Goebbels” and alleged that the widely aired broadcasts of emaciated prisoners all showed “the same guy” who Panic claimed was a Serb.