Serbs Declare Pullback From Heights at Sarajevo : Bosnia: A voluntary breaking of the ring around the city would reduce the likelihood of NATO air strikes.

Serbs besieging the capital of Bosnia announced Thursday they were pulling back from two mountains overlooking the city and would reopen two roads to boost the inflow of humanitarian relief.

“We agreed to open the city of Sarajevo as soon as possible,” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic said grandly after meeting with the U.N. commander for Bosnia, Gen. Francis Briquemont, at Bosnian Serb headquarters.

Officials of Bosnia’s Muslim-led government were skeptical, since all parties to the former Yugoslav republic’s civil war have chronically reneged on public commitments. As recently as Monday, Karadzic promised a withdrawal, yet the Serbs pushed forward.

Voluntarily breaking the ring that the Serbs have been trying to tighten around the city would greatly reduce the likelihood that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would follow through on its threat, made Monday, to use its warplanes to smash the Serbs’ blockade and allow more humanitarian aid to flow in.

The Serbs in the past have been inclined to laugh off Western threats as so much hot air, but Nikola Koljevic, a deputy to Karadzic, made it clear his compatriots were taking NATO’s decision, made under pressure from the Clinton Administration, seriously.

“We have agreed to unblock Sarajevo,” Koljevic told the Associated Press. “With this we are removing all the obstacles that have hindered the Geneva talks.”

As a “goodwill gesture,” he said, the Bosnian Serbs will reopen “as soon as possible” two roads leading to Zenica and Konjic, a pair of important towns outside Sarajevo held by Bosnia’s government army, as well as the two peaks, Mt. Igman and Mt. Bjelasnica.

Details are to be ironed out at a meeting today, the Serbs said, implying that a host of issues may still remain unsettled and that the whole arrangement could unravel.

Under the new agreement, Serbian troops are to withdraw from both Igman and Bjelasnica by the end of today, with control of the high ground being transferred to U.N. peacekeepers, Koljevic said.

If the Serbs follow through now and partly lift the 16-month siege of Sarajevo, the stalled talks on a peaceful solution to Bosnia’s civil war could be revived, acknowledged Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic.

“We’ll have to see whether this actually happens,” a politely dubious Silajdzic said in Geneva, the venue for the peace parleys.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic indicated he would be willing to meet on Monday with Bosnia’s Serbian and Croatian leaders, said John Mills, a spokesman for international mediators. Izetbegovic had boycotted the Geneva talks since last Monday, demanding that the Serbs quit the strategic heights above Sarajevo as a condition of resuming the negotiations.

Sweeping in from eastern Bosnia, Serbian troops this week captured Mt. Bjelasnica and at least the greater part of Mt. Igman, which dominate the southern approaches to the capital. On Wednesday, Bosnian Serb commander Gen. Ratko Mladic claimed both peaks had fallen to his troops.

However, Sarajevo Radio reported Thursday that forces loyal to the Muslim-led government had checked an overnight Serbian attack on Igman.

The commitments were offered at a meeting in Pale, the Bosnian Serbs’ command post, between Briquemont, who is a Belgian, and Karadzic. The Bosnian Serb military commander, Mladic, also attended, implying that this time soldiers on the ground might in fact heed the commitments made by their political leaders.

After Izetbegovic stayed away from the negotiating table for three straight days, Karadzic and the leader of Bosnia’s Croatian population, Mate Boban, left Geneva on Wednesday night, vowing to return only if Izetbegovic agreed to meet them.

Izetbegovic fears that he and his fellow Muslims--44% of the prewar population of Bosnia-Herzegovina--will be cornered in a landlocked enclave between Serb and Croat republics that will eventually join up with Serbia and Croatia.

The American legal adviser to the Bosnian delegation, Francis Boyle, appealed to President Clinton to strike down the plan for a territorial carve-up being pushed by Serbs and Croats on Izetbegovic, which Boyle termed a “death warrant.”

“The Bosnian people today will become just like the Jewish people a generation ago,” Boyle said as he arrived for the Geneva talks Thursday. “They can then be quietly liquidated.”

In another development Thursday, Serbian rebels in Croatia again shelled a strategically located pontoon bridge at Maslenica inlet that links Croatia’s south coast with the country’s heartland. Witnesses counted 11 artillery rounds. No injuries were reported.