Mediators Push Bosnia Peace Plan at Security Council : Balkans: U.S. still hasn’t decided whether to back proposal, which divides battered republic.

Special negotiators Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen presented their controversial Bosnian peace plan to the Security Council on Monday, even as the United Nations awaited word from Washington on whether the Clinton Administration would support the plan or try to transform it.

Owen, the European Community envoy in the peace negotiations and a former foreign secretary of Britain, and Vance, the United Nations’ representative and a former U.S. secretary of state, briefed the council for more than an hour.

Owen then told reporters that it was clear that the council, if it accepted a peace plan, intended to implement it in a “very thorough, well-thought-out and committed” manner.

This hint that the council might try to back up any peace agreement with the threat of military force appeared to coincide with some thinking of Administration officials. In their deliberations over ravaged Bosnia, it is understood that some officials have proposed that the United Nations use force, if necessary, to implement some kind of revised peace plan.

But the Administration was still deliberating about what to do. A U.N. spokesman reported that Secretary of State Warren Christopher had told Vance earlier Monday by phone that U.S. officials would complete their Bosnia policy review “as quickly as they can.”

Christopher, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and other U.S. officials--meeting without the President--continued their policy review during the day. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said he expected an announcement of the U.S. position later this week.

Vance and Owen have put their plan before the Security Council because they want the powerful international body to pressure warring sides in Bosnia to accept it.

The Administration has hesitated to support Vance and Owen because many U.S. officials believe their plan, as drawn, would reward Serbs for their aggression against Bosnia and would accept Serbs’ “ethnic cleansing”--the bloody removal of Muslims from Serb-held towns and villages.

To deal with this concern, Vance proposed that the Security Council set up an international criminal court to conduct trials of those accused of Yugoslav human rights violations and to create an International Commission on Human Rights for Bosnia.

According to the United Nations, Vance told the Security Council in its closed session that one of the aims of the peace plan was “to stop the criminal practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to reverse its consequences.”

In the most controversial part of the plan, drawn up after five months of largely fruitless talks, Vance and Owens would divide a federated Bosnia into 10 provinces. Each ethnic group--Serbs, Croats and Muslims--would dominate in three of them; all three would join in the administration of Sarajevo, the capital. So far, only the Bosnian Croats have accepted the 10-province division. It has been rejected by the Bosnian Serbs and by the Muslim government of Bosnia.

Vance and Owen, who had been meeting with Serbian, Croatian and Muslim representatives in Geneva, moved their talks to U.N. headquarters last week, hoping that Security Council members would persuade the three ethnic groups to accept the peace plan.

In a statement issued at U.N. headquarters, Yugoslav Foreign Minister Ilija Djukic said his government supported the Vance-Owen plan “as the most complete and realistic framework for establishing just and lasting peace in Bosnia.” The Yugoslav federal government now is made up of Serbia and Montenegro; there was hope at U.N. headquarters that Djukic’s statement might encourage the Bosnian Serbs to accept the plan.

In other Bosnian developments:

* Heavy fighting between tanks and artillery was reported throughout Bosnia in an evident attempt by each side to seize as much territory as possible in advance of a possible imposition of a peace plan by the Security Council. Bosnian radio reported that Serbian shells were raining down on Sarajevo, worsening the situation in the besieged capital.

* In Geneva, Kenneth Blackwell, the U.S. delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, said the United States would contribute $500,000 for an investigation to determine the identities of Serbian commanders who have organized mass rapes of Muslim women in Bosnia.

* The United Nations resumed humanitarian flights to Sarajevo after a 36-hour suspension. The flights were stopped Saturday after a German plane was hit by an antiaircraft artillery shell shortly after taking off from the Croatian capital of Zagreb. A crew member aboard the German transport plane was wounded and hospitalized. U.N. officials, who protested the shooting, said they had eyewitness evidence that the shell had been fired by Serbian troops.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.