Mediators Propose Halt to U.N. Effort in Bosnia : Balkans: The Security Council is asked to weigh the deteriorating situation against prospects for a negotiated settlement.

Dwindling prospects for peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the increasing dangers facing U.N. troops and aid workers have prompted Western mediators to propose abandoning the costly mission that aims to protect civilians while the rival armies battle on.

A report to the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday and interviews with senior aid officials disclose a growing sense of defeat among those representatives of the international community charged with easing the suffering of Bosnia’s beleaguered people.

Britain’s Lord Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg of Norway, respectively the negotiators for the European Community and the United Nations, said in their report to the Security Council that it should “consider the deteriorating situation on the ground against the prospects for a negotiated settlement.”

“There is a real risk that if the present downward spiral continues, it will be impossible for the United Nations to remain in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” warned the report from the mediators who have just concluded another fruitless round of talks with the Bosnian combatants.

The United Nations has more than 9,000 troops in Bosnia and 7,600 more preparing to move to six designated havens for Muslims.

Having concluded that there is no other alternative to continued warfare, Stoltenberg and Owen have been pressing the Bosnian government to agree to an ethnic partitioning of the republic, as proposed by the Serbian and Croatian forces that have overrun 90% of Bosnia. Government leaders have rejected division, despite being massively outgunned by their nationalist rivals.

Major fighting broke out again early Tuesday between Bosnian Croats and the predominantly Muslim government forces in the southern city of Mostar, diverting another relief convoy bearing food and medicine for 40,000 refugees in that region, a spokeswoman for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees reported.

“We had to turn back the convoy because of the security situation,” said Alemka Lisinski of the U.N. agency’s Zagreb office.

A spokesman for the U.N. Protection Force assigned to escort aid convoys in Bosnia said military observers have been barred from entering the conflict area by Bosnian Croat troops, but could see smoke and hear intense shellfire in the north of the city. They were told by the Croat forces that the battle was instigated by Muslims, but the spokesman said UNPROFOR had no confirmation of which side launched the offensive.

The humanitarian relief mission on which half of Bosnia’s people rely for their food was also disrupted in the republic’s eastern area, Lisinski said. A convoy of empty trucks and their drivers was blocked for a third day by Serbian soldiers insisting the drivers needed special visas to return to their base in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade after deliveries to a Bosnian Muslim enclave.

The U.N. refugee agency’s new special envoy to the region warns that its work is so often used as a weapon by one side against the other now that aid is reaching fewer and fewer victims with each passing week while attacks against relief workers escalate.

The veteran refugee official, Nicholas Morris, said that living conditions for Muslim refugees are so appalling that the agency will be forced to evacuate some U.N. safe areas unless they are radically improved before winter.

“If Srebrenica was a refugee camp anywhere else in the world, we would be mounting an emergency program to relocate its people,” Morris said of the worst of the six U.N.-designated enclaves that have been afforded little real protection.

The U.N. agency would not risk operating in Bosnia at all if its workers were not already trapped by the fighting and politics, he said, blaming both the international community and Bosnian faction leaders for failing to “reverse the logic of war.”

The top U.N. refugee official, Sadako Ogata, plans an emergency visit to the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo today to assess relief needs ahead of a major conference of donor countries in Geneva on Friday.

Conditions have deteriorated rapidly in Sarajevo in recent days as encircling Serbian gunmen have cut off a gas line that powered the only water-pumping facilities in the area. They are also blocking a vital diesel fuel delivery.