NEWS ANALYSIS : Wider Balkan Fighting Casts Doubt on Talks

As Serbian shells slammed into Bosnian cities and Croatian troops pressed an assault on U.N.-protected territory, leaders of the warring factions in former Yugoslav republics assured Western mediators Saturday of their heartfelt commitment to peace.

The escalating bloodshed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia has highlighted a flaw in the rationale of U.N. and European Community diplomats who contend that compelling the Balkan warlords to go through what appear to be only the motions of negotiation is a safer alternative to military measures that might force an end to the war.

Far from deterring violence, the forum conducted by U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance and the EC’s Lord Owen is serving, in the view of Bosnia’s civilians and the embattled Sarajevo leadership, to create a smoke screen for continued aggression and a high-profile venue for propaganda.

The past week has witnessed stepped-up offensives on all sides, including Croatian breaches of a year-old cease-fire, Bosnian Croat attacks on communities governed by Muslim allies and fierce fighting between Bosnian Serbs and Muslims for control of towns and villages in the republic’s northeast.

While the politicians talked, their rival militias continued to battle over territory and intensify doubts about the worth of the diplomatic breakthrough proclaimed here.

U.N. peacekeeping troops in the southern Bosnian town of Mostar confirmed heavy shellfire raining down on the city from Serb-held positions, said Fred Eckhard, spokesman for the Geneva talks.

Other U.N. sources confirmed that a Croatian offensive that began Friday in a U.N.-patrolled area of Croatia was still under way, despite official Zagreb claims to have completed a “limited operation” aimed at securing a strategic bridge linking central Croatia with its Adriatic Sea coast.

The attacks reflected months of growing Croatian frustration with a U.N. mission that has so far served to protect Serbian rule over one-third of Croatian territory conquered in a bloody rebellion in 1991.

But the assault, in open violation of the U.N. peacekeeping accord Croatia signed a year ago, has stirred near hysteria among Serbian gunmen in the conquered territories, which rebels now assert is the independent state of Serbian Krajina.

The Belgrade-based Tanjug news agency reported that 21 Serbian fighters were killed and mutilated during the Croatian offensive. The report could not be verified, but it immediately provoked threats of retaliation.

Krajina’s self-styled president, Goran Hadzic, announced full mobilization of Serbs in the disputed territory and declared “a state of war.”

“The Serbs will use everything in their defense from forks to rockets!” Krajina’s army commander, former Yugoslav army Gen. Mile Novakovic, told journalists in Belgrade.

“We’re back to square one,” Lt. Gen. Satish Nambiar, commander of the U.N. Yugoslav mission, told reporters in Zagreb.

Nambiar said Serbian rebels had raided several U.N.-monitored arsenals and made off with tanks and other heavy weaponry, raising fears that another season of fierce Serb-Croat fighting had begun.

Croatian troops shelled U.N. soldiers near the town of Zemunik, critically wounding a French peacekeeper, according to U.N. spokeswoman Shannon Boyd.

Eckhard announced here that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Yugoslav leaders had been persuaded to restore order in the Krajina. But there was no immediate indication that fighting in the volatile region had been quelled.

Serbian leaders from throughout the remains of Yugoslavia used the Geneva forum to make impassioned appeals for peace in their homeland, deploring the retaliatory violence spurred by their earlier offensives.

“We strongly demand that all offensive activity stop immediately,” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic proclaimed before a forest of television cameras.

Serb gunmen loyal to Karadzic have already seized 70% of Bosnia, where Serbs were only 31% of the prewar population. His forces also have been accused of the lion’s share of war crimes committed during the last 10 months of deadly sieges and “ethnic cleansing.”

Although the putative Bosnian Serb Parliament last week voted to back the Vance-Owen plan for peace in Bosnia, Karadzic has insisted that his followers retain the right to “self-determination,” a code word for secession and eventual union with Serbia.

Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic, the ideological godfather of the violent quest for a “Greater Serbia,” likewise expressed his hopes for a “just and lasting peace,” contending that it was the Bosnian Serbs, not the republic’s Muslim Slavs, who were the true victims of genocide.

Tens of thousands have died since Serbs rebelled against Bosnian independence, which politically severs them from Serbia. Sarajevo officials say that 80% of the casualties have been Muslim civilians.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, usually loath to meet with any Western press, strode up to a microphone and declared with determined sincerity that “the masters of war are trying now, when peace is clearly reachable, to burn a new, big fire.”

Bosnia’s predominantly Muslim leadership maintained a lower profile at the conference, which they complain has rewarded Serbian aggression by giving in to the rebels’ demands for ethnic division of the republic.

An exasperated Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic decried the continued Serbian bombardment of his republic’s main cities.

Keeping with a pattern of papering over disputes threatening the 4-month-old Geneva talks, Eckhard sought to play down the escalating hostilities.

He described the Croatian offensive as “a limited action against one bridge.”

Asked whether the U.N. considered the continued shelling of Sarajevo to be in violation of the Vance-Owen peace plan, Eckhard replied that “in theory” the fighting should have stopped.

Negotiations over borders for the 10 new provinces to be carved out of Bosnia broke up after only two hours.

Owen, a former British foreign minister now heading the EC’s stalled mission to restore Balkan peace, told reporters it would take “some time” to hammer out the details of the Bosnian division. Talks were to resume today.

“Whatever they decide here will mean hell down there,” an editor at Sarajevo’s Oslobodjenje newspaper, Mehmet Husic, said after the talks.

Special correspondent Laura Silber in Belgrade contributed to this story.