EC Rebuffs Bosnian Plea on Arms : Balkans: The Community’s leaders press the war-torn republic’s president to accept ethnic partition.

Balkan diplomacy snagged again Monday as the embattled Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina pleaded with the European Community to lift the international arms embargo against their country and the EC pressed them to accept the division of their country into ethnic zones.

Neither appeal succeeded, although Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic left open the possibility of negotiating with neighboring Serbia and Croatia over their proposal to carve Bosnia into three largely autonomous ethnic regions.

Under that plan, the Serbs and the Croats would keep most of the territory they have seized from the Muslims in the bloody civil war.

The crisis in the former Yugoslav federation was only one of many volatile issues on the agenda as leaders of the 12 EC nations opened their semiannual summit meeting.

The Western European leaders also tried to come to grips with the problem of mounting unemployment in the Community. But their effort revealed deep divisions between the British, who proposed restraining EC labor costs as a way of encouraging businesses to hire more workers, and the French, who suggested that Europe instead close its markets to goods from low-wage countries.

The Balkans will be the primary issue again today as the EC leaders seek a solution that has eluded them for two years. They will consider endorsing something like the plan offered by Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs and Croats to partition the country into largely autonomous Serbian, Croatian and Muslim regions, with the Muslims given much less territory than they controlled before civil war began.

Izetbegovic said he would not negotiate with the Serbs and the Croats if their plan became “the cover for further dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina.” No negotiations can proceed, he said, as long as Serbian aggression against the Muslims continues.

But he did not rule out negotiations if the aggression stops, and he is scheduled to consult with other Bosnian officials today about what to do next.

Other members of Bosnia’s collective presidency, which Izetbegovic heads, met in Zagreb, apparently driven to the Croatian capital because of fighting around their own capital, Sarajevo. Their discussions about the partition plan were inconclusive, but the Muslim-led government announced an emergency meeting of the presidency, Parliament deputies, opposition leaders and intellectuals in Sarajevo after the Zagreb talks.

Government spokeswoman Senada Kreso told the Associated Press that the Sarajevo meeting was necessary because the Serb-Croat plan “was too important a decision to be made” by the presidency alone.

Izetbegovic failed in his appeal to the EC to lift the U.N.-sponsored arms embargo that, he said, has contributed to “genocide” against Bosnia’s Muslims.

“The arms embargo has deprived Bosnia-Herzegovina of the right of legitimate self-defense,” he told reporters after meeting with foreign ministers of Britain, Denmark and Belgium.

Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen of Denmark, which holds the rotating EC presidency, said that ending the embargo would merely “lead to more fighting on the ground and at a more violent level.”

The United Nations, he said, might have to withdraw the troops that are ensuring the delivery of food and medical supplies to Bosnia’s Muslims.

Diplomats said that President Clinton has written to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, asking him to help persuade his EC colleagues to lift the embargo. Kohl tried, sources said, but failed.

Concluding their discussion on unemployment, which is about 11% and rising, the EC leaders agreed on little more than further study of the problem.

Jacques Delors, president of the EC’s executive commission, presented an eight-point plan that included movement toward a single EC currency, adoption of an international agreement to liberalize world trade, greater spending for research and development and a new emphasis on vocational training.

He also suggested imposing new taxes on energy and using the revenue “to reduce excessive taxes on labor, thus enhancing Europe’s economic competitiveness.”

A senior British official at the summit derided Delors’ proposals as falling far short.

“We don’t think they do anything to improve the Community’s competitiveness,” he said.

Earlier, British Prime Minister John Major had told the other 11 leaders that labor costs in the EC, driven by high taxes to finance Europe’s extensive system of social benefits, had pushed manufacturing labor costs to a level 20% higher than those in the United States and Japan.

But Denmark’s Petersen warned against adopting what he called the “U.S. model” of low wages and benefits.

“What we see in America are very, very serious defects . . . with social problems, crime and hopelessness in large urban areas,” he said.

A spokesman for French President Francois Mitterrand urged the Community instead to close its borders to countries that undersell its manufacturers by paying low wages and failing to clean up their pollution.