Owen Won’t Be ‘Fig Leaf’ in Bosnia : Balkans: Mediator is in Sarajevo to press his plan. He hints U.S. has undermined it.

European Community mediator Lord Owen vowed Friday that he would not be made a “fig leaf” for the West’s reluctance to stop the war in Bosnia and hinted that Washington had undermined his peace plan with a rival proposal.

Clearly miffed at U.N. member governments wavering over their own promises to impose a settlement, Owen said the international community now faces the question “of whether they are going to give up on the possibility of stitching Bosnia-Herzegovina back together.”

“Negotiators can do their utmost, but they do not have the power to deliver. That comes from the governments,” said the British diplomat who has spearheaded EC efforts to bring peace to Bosnia. “There’s no use passing resolutions of the Security Council if you don’t have the means to back them up, and there’s no use piling on rhetoric when you don’t mean it in terms of action.”

Owen and the new U.N. special envoy in the Balkan crisis, Norway’s Thorvald Stoltenberg, traveled to this war-ravaged Bosnian capital to resuscitate the peace plan drafted by Owen and former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance. But Serbian intransigence and bad weather thwarted their attempts to bring the warring factions together.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic would meet with the mediators only at his rebel headquarters in Pale, 10 miles east of here, and gave little sign of willingness to reconsider his rogue state’s refusal to accept the Vance-Owen plan.

“He’s very full of himself, says he can carry on for years and has all the supplies he needs,” Owen said of Karadzic, with whom he met Thursday. “But I think that is bravado.”

Karadzic appears to have interpreted the U.N. plan to set up six protected areas for Muslim Bosnians as a victory for his Serbian rebel forces and has pressed on with a fierce offensive against most of the enclaves that the U.N. Security Council designated for protection Friday. The Vance-Owen plan, which the Serbs oppose because they would have to withdraw from nearly half the territory they have conquered, was to have been implemented with a massive U.N. troop deployment, including a large contingent of U.S. forces. But Washington balked at sending in soldiers when the rebels refused to endorse the plan and Western European allies refused to endorse the use of air power against the Serbs. Instead, the Clinton Administration signed on to the plan for havens and for containing the conflict to Bosnia.

Owen described the shift in diplomatic gears as a “serious setback” for the peace process.

“I’m certainly not going to be used as a fig leaf for Dr. Karadzic’s behavior,” he said.

“We have strongly condemned the recent attacks against international aid workers, attacks that were not accidents,” said Stoltenberg. “These were deliberate, coldblooded attacks on unarmed and impartial humanitarian aid officials. The Italian, Danish and local colleagues were murdered as they attempted to help the civilian victims of this war.”

Owen and Stoltenberg met for several hours with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic on Friday and seemed to have been moved by his claim to be fighting to preserve the multicultural character of Bosnia. Bosnia’s population was thoroughly mixed before Serbian nationalist gunmen began applying their policy of “ethnic cleansing” 14 months ago.

“There won’t be any final victory for any of the warring parties,” Owen said, adding that “sensible Serbs know that the Muslim population, having been forced to take up arms and having been forced to choose an identity which in many ways they didn’t in the past have and didn’t seek, will not give up.”

Owen and Vance, who recently retired from a nearly two-year stint as the U.N. mediator in the former Yugoslav federation, have previously tended to characterize the Bosnian conflict as an intractable fight for territory among people predisposed to kill each other.

A meeting with Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban had been planned at the Sarajevo airport, but it had to be moved to Split, on Croatia’s Adriatic Sea coast, when rain and low visibility made it unsafe for the United Nations to ferry Boban here by helicopter.

The main promise of Boban’s visit might have been to make some headway in resolving bitter conflicts between Croats and Muslims in central Bosnia, as he has already endorsed the Vance-Owen plan that would leave him in control of more Bosnian territory than the 17% Croatian population would seem to justify.

Serbian rebels hold 70% of Bosnia and Boban’s HVO forces control much of the rest, leaving only a handful of heavily damaged urban enclaves for the republic’s Muslims, who were 44% of the prewar population, and for those Serbs and Croats ho still back integration.

The mediators, making their first joint visit to Sarajevo since Bosnian Serbs vetoed their peace plan three weeks ago, also sought fresh guarantees of security for U.N. and humanitarian aid personnel, who have been increasingly targeted while working in Bosnia, particularly by the Bosnian Serbs.