NEWS ANALYSIS : Seizure of Key Bosnia Corridor a Boon to Muslims : Balkans: Government offensive forges road link between population centers. Consolidated troops could assault Sarajevo’s besiegers.

Bosnian government troops this week captured a strategic corridor in the center of the republic, allowing them to consolidate scattered units of the once-ragtag army and positioning them for an assault on Serbian gunners besieging Sarajevo.

The Muslim-led army took the town of Vares with little fighting, as the Croatian nationalist forces that had been terrorizing Muslims in the region fled in fear of retribution as the government troops advanced.

Croats seeking to expand the territory they control in Bosnia-Herzegovina in expectation of an ethnic partitioning had been using Vares and the town of Breza, about 12 miles to the south, to block humanitarian aid to nearly 1 million Bosnians stranded in the Tuzla region.

In retaliation, Muslim women and children in the city of Zenica had been harassing aid convoys of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees headed east for Vares, complaining that the food and medicine were supporting Croatian extremists who controlled the town.

With the government’s capture of Vares and Breza, there is now an unhindered road link for crucial supplies to the Tuzla pocket, and government troops there and in Zenica can now join up for a push against the thin line of Serbian artillery that extends from eastern Bosnia to the U.N.-controlled Sarajevo airport west of the capital.

Much to the surprise of Western diplomats and the staff of U.N. headquarters here, the Bosnian army troops seem to have been invigorated by their government’s decision to fight on rather than accept the loss of most Bosnian territory to Serbian and Croatian rebels.

The government’s success in breaking the Croatian blockade and consolidating forces is widely expected to lead to more fighting and civilian hardship as the brutal Balkan winter descends on the mountainous battle zones.

Likewise, in Croatia, events of the past few days herald further bloodshed. Secret U.N.-sponsored talks in Norway between the Zagreb government and Serbian rebels in the disputed Krajina region broke down Wednesday with no immediate hope of resumption.

A U.N. official from Norway, Knut Vollebaek, told journalists here that the Oslo talks had focused on re-establishing railroad, transportation and energy supply lines between Croatia’s vital Adriatic Sea coast and the Krajina region seized by the Serbian rebels in 1991.

But he said the most divisive question--how much autonomy Zagreb would allow the Serbian enclave--had been avoided.

Krajina’s Serbian delegation left the Oslo talks because Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had sent new instructions to the Zagreb contingent to take a harder line, according to the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug.

Negotiations aimed at resolving the 19-month-old crisis in Bosnia collapsed in September, after the Sarajevo government rejected a proposal by Serbian and Croatian rivals to split the republic into Serbian, Croatian and Muslim ministates.

That plan had the tacit support of U.N. special envoy Thorvald Stoltenberg and European Community negotiator Lord Owen.

Both mediators have since pushed for a “global approach” to restart peace talks on Bosnia and coordinate them with negotiations aimed at breaking the more than two-year stalemate over Krajina.

Croatian Foreign Minister Mate Granic sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council urging a special session to address the crisis in Bosnia, where he claimed 150,000 Croats were being forced to flee the Muslim-led offensive.

But the mediators and officials of the U.N. Protection Force perceive little appetite on the part of the Bosnian combatants for compromise, and waning commitment among Western countries to impose a solution.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had promised as many as 50,000 troops to police a cease-fire and oversee ethnic migrations in the event the three parties endorsed the proposed division.

But the NATO countries that had pledged the troops, including up to 25,000 from the United States, put conditions on deployment that would prevent their timely arrival. President Clinton, for instance, said Congress would have to approve any U.S. participation--a procedure likely to take weeks of debate.

Faced with the reality that no effective Western intervention was likely, the Bosnian government rejected the ethnic carve-up plan on Sept. 30, and its forces have been on the offensive ever since.

Despite being heavily outgunned by both Serbian and Croatian rebels, who are supplied by their patrons in Serbia and Croatia, the government forces have rolled across dozens of towns and villages in the past month. This has widened the central region into which most of the 2 million Muslim Slavs of Bosnia have been pushed through the practice of “ethnic cleansing.”

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali suspended aid convoys to central Bosnia following the deaths of two aid workers in the past week, said refugee agency spokesman Peter Kessler.

He noted Croatian Radio and U.N. Protection Force reports that thousands of Croatian troops were massing in the town of Kiseljak, west of Sarajevo, apparently to challenge the advancing government forces.