Muslims, Croats Fight On Despite Bosnia Truce Accord : Balkans: Rebel Serbs report that a weekend referendum produced a 96% vote against a Western peace plan.

Muslim and Croatian forces reignited a central Bosnian battlefront Wednesday as they were supposed to be observing a truce, while rebel Serbs reported that a weekend referendum produced an unequivocal 96% vote against a Western plan to reunify Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The actions of all three combatants in the vicious 14-month-old Bosnian war appeared to doom already minuscule chances for resurrecting a settlement proposed by U.N. and European Community mediators six months ago.

Even the U.N. human rights investigator, former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, criticized the plan for encouraging partition of Bosnia and thereby accelerating the reviled practice of “ethnic cleansing.”

The plan drafted by U.N. envoy Cyrus R. Vance and Britain’s Lord Owen would divide Bosnia into 10 provinces and dole them out to the three major communities--Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

“The peacelines, has been used in order to create ethnically homogenous areas,” Mazowiecki charged in his latest report to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

“The lack of an effective international response to counter the policy of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Serb forces . . . created the precedent of impunity which has allowed them to continue and which has encouraged Croat forces to adopt the same policy,” the special investigator said.

The embattled southwestern city of Mostar was reported quiet after Bosnian Croat and Muslim leaders met Tuesday and agreed to measures aimed at defusing tensions between their forces. But U.N. troops reported fierce fighting in central Bosnia, most intensely around the British peacekeeping base in Vitez.

Bosnian government-controlled Sarajevo Radio also reported fresh attacks by Serbian forces in the north of the republic, around the city of Brcko, where the rebels, who control 70% of Bosnia, have been attempting to widen a crucial corridor linking Serb-held areas of Bosnia and Croatia with the republic of Serbia.

At Bosnian Serb headquarters in the mountain resort of Pale, just east of Sarajevo, rebel leader Radovan Karadzic proclaimed the overwhelming “no” vote on the Vance-Owen plan and said it confirmed his faction’s commitment to independence for their self-styled Serb republic.

Claiming a turnout of 1.1 million voters in a region thought to be home to about 1.7 million, Pale authorities said that 96% had voted against the Vance-Owen plan, according to Belgrade Radio.

Foreign mediators’ frustration with fruitless negotiations and their failure to stanch the Balkan bloodshed was evident in the comments of Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, who warned during a visit to Rome that the only alternative to the Vance-Owen plan is a wider and deadlier war.

“If the Vance-Owen plan is dead, then what is alive? Probably everything and everyone will be dead in Yugoslavia,” Kozyrev said.