U.N. Asks for 3 More Days to Disarm Srebrenica Defenders : Bosnia: Delay could forestall town’s collapse and anger Serbs. Sanctuaries for Muslims also sought.

U.N. officials said Tuesday that they need three more days to disarm the Muslim defenders of embattled Srebrenica, a move that could forestall the eastern Bosnian town’s collapse and anger rebel Serbs poised to overrun it.

In another sign of strengthened international resolve to protect civilians in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees appealed to the Security Council to establish “safe havens” in Zepa and Gorazde, where more than 100,000 Muslims have been holding out for a year against Serbian sieges.

Both efforts underscored U.N. insistence that an agreement brokered Sunday in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo was not a surrender of Srebrenica to its Serbian attackers but an attempt to stop the killing and starvation.

The agreement called for a cease-fire to allow delivery of aid to the town, deployment of 150 Canadian troops to ensure humanitarian conditions, an airlift of 500 wounded Muslim fighters to the government stronghold of Tuzla and the handing over of defenders’ weapons by noon today.

The fighters have already been evacuated and the truce has mostly been respected, although U.N. troops reported sporadic small-arms fire on the town’s outskirts, where Serbian gunmen have dug in and positioned heavy artillery.

Once weapons inside the town are collected in accordance with its designation as a U.N.-protected area, the U.N. refugee agency has agreed to evacuate as many as 2,000 refugees each day, if local authorities approve, to ease demands on the inundated city that is without power, clean water, medical care or much food.

But officials at the U.N. Protection Force headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia, said few of Srebrenica’s defenders had turned in their weapons by late Tuesday and conceded it was unlikely the disarmament would be completed by the original deadline.

A 72-hour extension of the deadline has been requested, a U.N. spokesman in Zagreb said. Some small arms have been given up but none of the heavy weaponry in the possession of local forces loyal to the Sarajevo government, he said.

Gen. Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb army, rejected the request for a delay, the Bosnian Serb news agency SRNA reported. Mladic said he will hold Gen. Lars-Eric Wahlgren, commander of the U.N. Protection Force, “personally responsible if the Muslims in Srebrenica do not surrender their weapons by 12:05 p.m. tomorrow (today).”

Both Serbian and Bosnian government forces have characterized the Sarajevo agreement as a surrender plan, but U.N. officials struggling to create the impression that their extensive presence in Bosnia is making a difference have steadfastly rejected the widespread interpretation that they have sanctioned the collapse of Srebrenica.

“This is certainly not a surrender agreement,” insisted Cedric Thornberry, deputy chief of the U.N. mission, which has more than 25,000 troops in the republics of former Yugoslavia.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has said his forces will not take Srebrenica, that they will only “pacify” it. But Serbian gunmen have massed just a few hundred yards from the town center and are expected to resume artillery assaults to capture it if the Muslim inhabitants do not flee.

The Muslim-led government is believed to have agreed to what amounts to a surrender in exchange for the protective deployment of the Canadian peacekeepers, gambling that the foreign troops’ presence will deter any flagrant Serbian advance or attacks on civilians.

Local authorities have also indicated that they will bar the relocation of Srebrenica natives, who are about one-third of the estimated 30,000 or so population swollen by the influx of those evicted from other areas of eastern Bosnia.

The U.N. refugee agency has offered to help move emaciated and homeless refugees from Srebrenica to Tuzla, where they can be better cared for, but it contends that it is not encouraging an exodus that could be construed as abetting Serbs in their goal of creating ethnically pure territory for annexation to a Greater Serbia.

In Geneva, spokesman Ron Redmond said the refugee agency wants Zepa and Gorazde accorded “safe haven” status to prevent their deterioration into a humanitarian nightmare like Srebrenica.

He said the agency remains concerned that designating safe areas could serve to accelerate “ethnic cleansing” by encouraging Muslims to seek refuge there.

But Zepa, Gorazde and Srebrenica are already the last eastern Bosnian enclaves in an area otherwise expunged of non-Serbs, and Redmond argued that conditions there are already “so dire that we don’t see any other option.”

Elsewhere in Bosnia:

* Fierce fighting between previously allied Muslims and Croats in central Bosnia continued for a fourth day in the towns of Zenica, Vitez and Kiseljak and spread to the key Croat-controlled city of Mostar. At least 200 people have been reported killed since Friday.

* U.S. pilots patrolling the skies over Bosnia reported the first confirmed violation of the U.N. “no-fly” zone. Two U.S. F-15s on Monday tracked a low-flying helicopter until it landed near the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Banja Luka.

* A NATO spokesman in Naples, Italy, said alliance warships intercepted a Honduran vessel suspected of trying to break an international blockade to deliver fuel to the rump Yugoslavia. It was the second such incident in four days.