Bosnia’s Leader Threatens to Quit Peace Talks : Balkans: President Izetbegovic says 1,000 are dying daily in Serbian siege as Geneva deadlock goes on.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic claimed Monday that 1,000 people are being killed each day in the Serbian siege of his country, and he threatened to pull out of deadlocked peace talks here unless all heavy weapons there are brought under Western control.

He said he is frustrated with the Geneva forum that has compelled him to negotiate with Serb militants responsible for the shocking death and destruction afflicting his former Yugoslav republic. He said 200,000 Bosnians have been killed since April and 1.5 million forced to flee their homes.

As Western mediators pressed on with the paralyzed peace talks here, Serbs and Croats fought fierce battles near the Adriatic Sea, and Serb rebels intensified their mortar barrage against the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

“The killing of the civilian population is continuing, the towns are still under siege and people are now being killed also by starvation and exposure to cold,” Izetbegovic told a news conference during one of many extensive breaks in the talks mediated by U.N. and European Community diplomats.

Arguing that distant debates over legal principles cannot be successful while guns are blazing, he demanded that the United Nations enforce its own 8-month-old resolution ordering all tanks and artillery in the republic to be brought under U.N. control.

He gave no deadline by which he expects Western nations to break the siege of Sarajevo and other Bosnian cities. But when asked how long he will continue to take part in the Geneva talks while the war rages unabated, he replied: “We are speaking of days.”

Undaunted by the unraveling of a year-old Croatian cease-fire--the only diplomatic success in the Yugoslav crisis--U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance and the EC’s Lord Owen have pressed on with their Bosnian conference, while issuing appeals for an end to the latest violent outbreaks.

Croatian army troops violated a peace agreement negotiated by Vance more than a year ago when they invaded a U.N.-protected area near Zadar on Friday to seize a strategic route blocked by rebel Serbs. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman told Croatian TV over the weekend that the military operation had been successfully completed and that work was soon to begin to restore transport and communication with the region that is home to 700,000 Croats.

However, U.N. military monitors in the area reported that fighting was steadily intensifying.

The Croatian fighting has provided the latest disruption of the Bosnian peace talks, which have dragged on since September with no credible results.

All three Bosnian factions--the Muslim Slav-led government, the rebel Serbs and the Croatian community--have endorsed a general formula for restructuring Bosnia into 10 semiautonomous provinces under a central, multiethnic government in Sarajevo. But Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has since claimed his forces retain the right to secede and annex their conquered territory to a Greater Serbia.

The perseverance of Vance and Owen in the face of alarming setbacks served to validate Bosnian complaints that the Geneva forum has become a cover for Western unwillingness to force an end to the war.

“Military intervention is already late by half a year,” Izetbegovic said. “At least 1,000 people are killed daily. If the international community fulfilled its obligations to (a member) state that is being attacked, every day 1,000 lives could be saved.”

The president, a Muslim Slav, said Bosnia’s army would be capable of defending the country itself, without Western intervention, if the United Nations would lift an arms embargo that prohibits any of the Yugoslav successor states from buying weapons. Bosnia’s Serbs have been armed by Yugoslavia, where munitions factories operate without restriction.

“As it is now, we are left to be killed,” Izetbegovic said.

Discussion of military intervention to break the 10-month-old Serbian siege has been delayed by the U.N. Security Council pending an outcome of the Geneva talks.

“We are frequently reminded that if we do not accept that we must keep talking to war criminals, public opinion would shift away from us,” lamented Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic. “Frankly, I don’t care about foreign public sympathies any more because they have brought nothing to us. I care about the suffering of my people.”

The Sarajevo government has criticized Vance and Owen for going back on a promise not to cave in to Serbian rebel pressure to divide the thoroughly integrated republic into small units based on ethnicity. Vance and Owen claim their proposed restructuring of Bosnia into provinces was designed to reflect geography and administration, as well as ethnic composition.

But the provinces conform with regions from which Serbs have evicted Muslims and Croats, testifying to a nationalist carve-up. Bosnian Croats have accepted the mediators’ plan for reconfiguration, since it awards them all of the territory where they are the majority population.

Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic, whom U.S. officials have accused of war crimes, continues to haggle over details of the political settlement while Sarajevo, Mostar and other cities continue to be attacked with mortars and sniper fire.

“The maps are really a very sensitive matter,” Karadzic said after Monday’s session, warning mediators they should drop insistence on preserving the republic borders that were delineated within Yugoslavia.

Forces loyal to Karadzic and Serbian nationalist leaders in Belgrade have conquered 70% of Bosnia and expelled non-Serbs in a practice the rebels refer to as “ethnic cleansing.”

“We entered these talks expecting that they would not legalize the demographic picture created in Bosnia-Herzegovina by ethnic cleansing,” Izetbegovic complained.

But the proposal for ethnic division of Bosnia has betrayed the very principles under which the Geneva conference was organized and puts into question the value of continued participation, he said.

“As long as we see that this conference may help in calming down the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we will continue,” Izetbegovic said.

Silajdzic accused Vance and Owen of “cynicism and expedience” in succumbing to Serbian pressure to ethnically divide the country that was 44% Muslim, 31% Serbian and 17% Croatian before the war.

“What we are doing in Geneva is accommodating and legitimizing the de facto situation. It is rewarding the aggression,” the Bosnian foreign minister said, adding that Western mediators “should face the fact that aggression has now been introduced as a legal factor in international negotiations.”