Bosnia Government Tentatively OKs Havens Plan : Balkans: It had condemned the proposal. Now it seeks economic and security guarantees to protect Muslims in the safe areas.

Cornered on the world diplomatic stage and facing a war that is rapidly closing in on them, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s leaders dropped their opposition Monday to a U.N. plan to set up six safety zones for Muslims but sought additional economic and security guarantees to protect those sheltered there.

Clearing the way for the deployment of up to 10,000 additional U.N. troops, Bosnia’s mainly Muslim government said it accepted the plan, which it had previously condemned as a formula for driving Muslims into ghettos. But it asked that the six enclaves--which are surrounded by the forces of Bosnian Serb rebels--be linked by protected corridors for free access and protected from Serbian heavy artillery.

A government statement said it has decided to tentatively accept the plan, adopted by the U.N. Security Council last week, because it is “faced with the risk of the rapid increase of fighting.”

Observers have questioned whether implementation of the plan will come too late. Bosnian Serbs have seized the opportunity afforded by international indecision to consolidate their gains, most recently in Gorazde, one of the designated areas, where an estimated 30,000 civilians are trapped under an intense Serbian assault. Six civilians were reported killed and 26 wounded on Sunday.

Serbian forces were also reported to have begun shelling again over the weekend three villages near Srebrenica, another of the proposed safe zones.

As Serbs on Monday launched their 12th day of attacks on Gorazde, fierce fighting continued between Muslims and their onetime Croat allies in western and central Bosnia.

After heavy fighting between Muslim and Croat forces in Mostar in recent weeks, new fighting has broken out in the Travnik region, where U.N. military sources report that hundreds of people have been killed in recent days and thousands of Croat civilians are fleeing in the face of strong Muslim attacks.

“I believe the number of dead is a matter of hundreds,” one Western U.N. officer said. “We don’t know the precise figure because we still can’t get in to all the villages.”

The U.N. sources said the Muslims had driven the Croats out of Travnik in the fighting over the weekend and had followed this Monday by pushing out another 3,000 Croat civilians in a wave of “ethnic cleansing.” Croatian Radio reported that 4,000 people have fled their homes in the attacks.

Croatian commanders in the area told news agencies that they surrendered their men to local Serbian forces, their onetime enemies, rather than give up to the attacking Muslims.

The Bosnian government’s tentative acceptance of the plan to create the six havens for its beleaguered citizens came only days before a report is due from U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on how the plan should be implemented.

The Sarajevo government’s move appeared to reflect an acknowledgment of its declining options: Western nations have rejected any other form of international intervention in the conflict and the only long-term peace plan for the Balkans, a U.N.-brokered proposal to divide Bosnia into 10 provinces for Serbs, Muslims and Croats, has been blocked by the Serbs.

Only last week, the government’s U.N. representatives were bitterly critical of the havens plan. They said it was cover for the international community’s failure to mount an effective intervention to stop the fighting and they complained that it would freeze Serbia’s gains in Bosnia.

In more than a year of fighting, Serbs in Bosnia, rebelling against the republic’s declaration of independence from the former Yugoslav federation, have captured and now control 70% of the stillborn country.

Pointing to the current sieges of Gorazde, Srebrenica and other Muslim enclaves, the Bosnian government said the safe areas plan would drive Muslims into unsafe ghettos that the international community would have no effective way of protecting.

Many U.N. officials in the Balkans have expressed skepticism that enough troops and money can be found to offer effective protection to the six havens: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Srebrenica, Zepa, Bihac and Gorazde.

The 9,000 peacekeepers that the United Nations now has in Bosnia are authorized only to guard food and medical supplies and protect themselves. The new forces would be permitted to use force to “deter attacks” on the safe areas, but the extent of their mandate for protecting civilians remains unclear.

In its statement signaling cooperation with the safe areas plan, the Bosnian government reiterated its longstanding demand for lifting an international arms embargo to allow outgunned Muslims to defend themselves.

It also outlined its own conditions for establishing the safe zones:

* That they be expanded to include protection of the “economic environment” around the zones and linked via U.N.-controlled corridors to the few remaining areas still controlled by the Muslim government.

* That Serbian heavy weapons be withdrawn from the areas around the havens and that U.N. monitors be posted on the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The border is still thought to be a major supply route for the Serbs in Bosnia, who, like their fellow Serbs in adjacent Serbia, have rejected monitors on their territories.

The Bosnian government also urged the Security Council to approve a resolution reaffirming its commitment to the peace plan proposed by U.N. special envoy Cyrus R. Vance and the European Community’s Lord Owen.

The peace formula is in limbo; Muslims and Croats approved it, but Bosnian Serbs rejected it in a referendum last month.