Mediators Give Up on Bosnia Talks : Balkans: Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen break off Geneva negotiations after last-ditch effort for peace accord fails. They turn to the U.N. Security Council to intervene.

Exasperated Western mediators broke off deadlocked peace talks Saturday after failing to persuade rebel Serbs and the Bosnian government to accept a cease-fire and division of the former Yugoslav republic.

The fruitless, 5-month-old peace talks in Geneva were adjourned by U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen of the European Community, who planned to pass the crisis over to the U.N. Security Council this week.

Collapse of the Geneva talks confronts the Security Council anew with the question of how to resolve the devastating and dangerous Balkan conflict and increases pressure on the new Clinton Administration to define its approach.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher has ordered a complete review of all possible options, but he cautioned reporters Thursday against expecting an early decision on a new U.S. policy.

Western countries, primarily the United States, have been pondering air strikes to knock out the heavy guns with which the Serbs have encircled Sarajevo and systematically destroyed the once-scenic Bosnian capital. Washington is also weighing the possibility of lifting a U.N. arms embargo that has deprived the Bosnian forces of weapons for defense against the Serbs, who were bequeathed a massive arsenal by their patrons in Belgrade.

Vance and Owen had announced before the final negotiating session in Geneva that they would present the Bosnian factions with a take-it-or-leave-it choice on their proposal for ending the Bosnian carnage.

Declaring the 10-month-old Bosnian war the most savage of this century, Owen told reporters he saw no sense in pressing on with the stalled talks.

“During all this talk a war is going on,” Owen said, criticizing repeated attempts by the rival delegations to postpone a final decision on the proposed settlement. “People are losing their lives, and (the faction leaders) have to make up their minds.”

The plan drafted by Vance and Owen would carve up Bosnia-Herzegovina into 10 provinces, each of which would be governed by its majority ethnic group. A central leadership in Sarajevo would be retained but considerably weakened.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic has accused Vance and Owen of caving in to Serb pressure to divide his country into ethnic pieces--something the mediators promised at the onset of the talks that they would not do.

But Serbian rebels, armed and supported by Serbian nationalists in Belgrade, have already conquered 70% of Bosnia and expelled most non-Serbs, presenting the Geneva forum with a fait accompli .

Izetbegovic rejected the mediators’ territorial distribution, contending that it legitimized the terror tactics Serbian militants used against civilians to force them from their homes in a practice known as “ethnic cleansing.”

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a close ally of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s, also rejected the proposed division because it would require his gunmen to give up about one-third of their captured land.

The third faction at the Geneva talks, Bosnia’s Croatian community, endorsed all aspects of the proposed settlement, which would award them more territory than they expected. Bosnia’s Croats live compactly in contiguous areas of the republic’s southwest, so ethnic division poses fewer disruptions for them than for the Muslim Slavs who were thoroughly mixed into the areas now under armed Serbian control.

Muslims account for most of the 2 million displaced by fighting and “ethnic cleansing,” as well as for most of the casualties.

Last week, Izetbegovic said the death toll exceeded 200,000 in the republic that was 44% Muslim, 31% Serb and 17% Croat before the war.

Compromise between Karadzic and Izetbegovic has been elusive because they hold irreconcilable positions.

Karadzic, representing a heavily armed and staunchly nationalist faction of the Bosnian Serbs, wants the republic to be divided into ethnic provinces and for the Serb-dominated pieces to be annexed to the Republic of Serbia and Serb-occupied areas of Croatia.

The Vance-Owen formula would preclude secession.

The Bosnian government, which is led by Muslims but advocates integration and ethnic tolerance, wants Bosnia to be restored to the unified state that existed before the armed Serbian rebellion began last April.

Owen said when announcing adjournment of the Geneva talks that he and Vance would seek U.N. Security Council backing to impose their settlement on the combatants by threatening them with “political, economic or military” consequences for noncompliance.

But the threat of diplomatic or economic sanctions on a country where civilians are already starving and freezing to death because of war privations seemed unlikely to move the Bosnian leadership to accept what it sees as an unjust and untenable peace.

It also remained to be seen how the Karadzic faction would react to Western intervention, which the Sarajevo government has been appealing for since the Serbian rebels launched their siege.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this article.