War-Weary Sarajevo Residents Turn Ire on Negotiators : Bosnia: Muslims say European mediators tried to force Serb-Croat plan on them that would have unjustly divided nation.

After the collapse of negotiations in Geneva on the deadly conflict convulsing Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo officials and war-weary citizens have turned their wrath toward the European mediators they accuse of having sought to railroad through an unjust peace.

Although they hunger for an end to the siege, many residents of this ravaged capital seem more relieved than fearful that the U.N. and European Community negotiators failed to sate Serbian and Croatian nationalist forces by cutting the country into ethnic pieces.

Few here expect the relative calm of the latest cease-fire to last much longer. The deaths Friday of two civilians felled by Serbian snipers at a busy intersection served to remind those lulled by the recent letup in shelling that they remain in their attackers’ sights.

But people in the capital seem far from disappointed that what seemed like an imminent solution to the 17-month-old conflict fell apart at the last moment, when President Alija Izetbegovic stood his ground in Geneva and demanded survival conditions for what would be left of his state.

A Serb-Croat proposal for carving out three ethnic mini-states was left languishing at the abandoned bargaining table. The mediators, Lord Owen of Britain and Norway’s Thorvald Stoltenberg, have warned that the people of Bosnia may pay for the failure with more blood.

Despite their precarious position in this poorly supplied and militarily strangled center of the former Yugoslav republic, Bosnians--especially those in integrated Sarajevo--express little sorrow over the latest missed chance for peace.

“Bosnia can’t be divided in this way. There is no way to divide our apartments or our marriages or our families,” insisted Croatian pensioner Stipo Samardzic, gesturing toward Muslim and Serbian friends with whom he was sharing a cigarette.

His daughter, Svjetlana, who is married to a Serb, lamented the lost opportunity to halt the killing and chaos before the onset of winter. But she agreed with many other Sarajevans that nothing was to be gained through capitulation on their tormentors’ terms.

“We fear the deaths of many more innocents (if the war continues), but if we were going to be forced to accept division we needed the minimum conditions for survival, and even this the aggressors refused to allow,” said the 33-year-old nurse, worriedly watching over her children enjoying a rare chance for outdoor play.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had raised expectations of a negotiated solution early this week when he predicted that Izetbegovic, a Muslim who advocates a multiethnic Bosnia, would approve the plan for ethnic division that Karadzic drafted with Bosnian Croat chief Mate Boban.

But when Karadzic and Boban refused to grant the Muslim remnant of Bosnia any access to the Adriatic Sea or recovery of any of the conquered and ethnically “cleansed” Muslim heartland, Izetbegovic walked out of the talks.

It was the second time this year that the mediators saw their peace process unravel when they believed that a settlement was close at hand. Owen proclaimed a Balkan-wide peace in early May after Karadzic agreed to a plan that would have divided Bosnia into 10 ethnic enclaves, only to see the formula later rejected by the rogue Bosnian Serb Parliament.

More than their failure to broker a solution to the violence that has already taken 200,000 lives, Sarajevans resent the mediators--especially Owen--for what they see as an unscrupulous attempt to force the attackers’ conditions for peace on the beleaguered victims.

“Lord Owen has nothing positive to contribute to these negotiations. Everything he has advocated has been to the detriment of Bosnia,” Deputy Prime Minister Hadjo Efendic said. “Instead of demanding that the aggression be stopped, he sought to equate victims and aggressors and to resolve the situation through edict.”

Bosnian Information Minister Ivo Knezevic denounced Owen for threatening a cutoff of aid to Bosnian civilians unless Izetbegovic accepted the carve-up plan.

The British peer would resign if he had “even a bit of the honor his title implies,” stated Knezevic, who has on occasion been a party to the talks that Owen has conducted since September of last year.

A senior official in the presidency said the Bosnian leadership was planning to ask the U.N. Security Council to dismiss Owen and Stoltenberg for discrediting themselves by backing the division plan worked out by politicians whom their own governments have accused of committing war crimes.

Karadzic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, both of whom Owen has considered the negotiating equals of Izetbegovic, have been identified by U.S. and human rights officials as potential subjects for a war crimes tribunal for allegedly masterminding atrocities.

“Everyone here is sick of war and wants an end to it,” said Fajsad Kulina, a former traffic engineer who is recuperating from battle wounds in a tiny apartment darkened by the plastic and cardboard covering shell-shattered windows. “But we have an expression--’better in the grave than a slave.’ We couldn’t have lived in the ghettos the Serbs and Croats wanted to make for us.”

Efendic said, “We don’t want an ethnic division, but if the world insists, it must at least be a just reflection of the population distribution before the war.”