Serbs Scoff at Threats of Military Intervention : Balkans: Hard-liners show inflexibility on peace plan and are undeterred by prospect of crippling U.N. sanctions.

To Western threats of military intervention to halt the deadly drive for a Greater Serbia, gunslinging patriots and rogue politicians have an unwaveringly defiant reply: Come right ahead.

“America can threaten others but not the Serbian people. We would rather die fighting for our freedom than sign it away to live in peace,” insisted Dragan Milanovic, a portly delegate to the self-styled Bosnian Serb legislature who sees an international peace plan as a crushing blow to Serbian dreams of territorial grandeur.

Milos Petrovic, a 28-year-old fighter with the rebel army, takes a similarly inflexible stance in rejecting the settlement drafted by U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance and Lord Owen of the European Community.

“The Vance-Owen plan is a slow death for the Serbian people, and if death is what we face we prefer a swift one,” said the soldier headed off for the front near Brcko, 25 miles west, where Serbian forces are trying to capture another isolated pocket of government-held land.

Undeterred by the threat of crippling U.N. sanctions taking effect early Tuesday and growing calls in the West for military strikes against the Serbs, those who wield power in Serb-held areas of Bosnia, whether with guns or government office, make clear they will not compromise in their quest for an ethnically pure state.

Owen, who has been shuttling among the Balkan capitals to pressure Serbian leaders to endorse his peace plan, spent six hours with Radovan Karadzic on Sunday in a failed bid to get the Serbian chieftain to change his mind.

Karadzic has said Bosnian Serbs will never accept a settlement that deprives them of the right to unite all their conquered territories.

“I refuse to believe that what I heard from Dr. Karadzic was his final word or the final word of the Serbian people,” said a baffled Owen, who has spent little time with heartland Serbs like the nationalists holding sway in the self-styled legislature.

But as Karadzic predicted, the gruff delegates to the body that claims to speak for Bosnia’s 1.5 million Serbs unanimously rejected the Vance-Owen plan after an all-night session Sunday. They had warned they would turn down any settlement denying them full independence from the Sarajevo government and exclusive control over the 70% of Bosnian territory they have overrun.

The Bosnian Serbs’ intransigence on the Vance-Owen peace plan, which would require them to retreat from about half of the land they have seized, has angered Western political alliances that have worked for nearly a year to broker a settlement. It has also given weight to Western proponents of air strikes against Serbian artillery or of lifting an arms embargo that would give the Muslim-led government a fair chance against the vast arsenal of the Serbian forces.

Western reluctance to intervene has given the rebels reason to believe they are invincible, even if confronted with the military might of the United States or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“Our people know we might be bombed. But what can anyone do to us? Bombs can’t destroy our rivers and mountains,” said Miroslav Vjesdaca, a camouflage-clad delegate from the town of Bosanska Krupa, which was a heavily Muslim area before the war. “We will outlast every aggressor and defend every single stone.”

While officials and soldiers exude bluster and bravado, some Serbian civilians have tired of the war that has ripped apart their homeland and divided friends and families.

Sara Maric offered the usual Serbian criticism of the Vance-Owen plan, then conceded that she didn’t really know what boundaries or principles were at issue.

“We are all very worried,” the 48-year-old peasant admitted in a burst of emotion that cracked a veneer of nationalist resolve. “It would be better to find some solution than to keep on with the fighting.”

The mother of a 22-year-old Serbian warrior who has fought at various Croatian and Bosnian fronts for nearly two years, Maric says she no longer knows what the rebels are fighting for.

“A long time ago, I was proud my son was a soldier, but the time for those feelings is past,” she said from behind her produce market stall. “Now, I fear for his life.”

In what would be an innocuous statement in peacetime but now demands unfathomable courage, Hanumka Topalovic elbowed through the cluster of traders to tell foreign visitors that what Bosnia needs now is peace.

“We have a lot of mixed marriages in this area. We need to be able to live together again,” said the 25-year-old Muslim who is married to a local Serb.

Topalovic trembled as Serbian vendors gathered around to shout her down in a brutal display of the virulent spite spawned by a war they feel powerless to end.

“It will be worse for you in prison,” one woman whispered to Topalovic, contending for the benefit of other listeners that Serbs are ready to fight to the end.