EC Officials Break Off Talks on Bosnia : Balkans: Serbs, balking at compromise, are blamed for ending hopes for holiday peace accord.

European Community foreign ministers gave up in frustration and headed off for Christmas breaks Wednesday after failing to compel rebel Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina to compromise on an ethnic partitioning aimed at restoring peace.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic also flatly refused to allow the 12-nation alliance to launch a new humanitarian airlift to hungry civilians in Tuzla, the latest multiethnic city to fall victim to a Serbian siege.

Belgian Foreign Minister Willy Claes, whose country holds the rotating EC presidency, blamed Karadzic for scuttling the last chance for a peace accord before the holidays and risking a humanitarian disaster.

The Bosnian faction leaders did reaffirm their commitment to a holiday cease-fire scheduled to take effect Friday, and they offered fresh assurances of safe passage for relief convoys throughout the war-ravaged republic.

But as the politicians talked in this European capital, a U.N. spokesman in Sarajevo accused Serbs of thwarting aid deliveries and stepping up shelling of the besieged Bosnian capital.

U.N. Protection Force spokesman Idesbald van Biesebroeck also blamed Serbian fighters for a machine-gun attack on a U.N. plane Tuesday that prompted a one-day suspension of the vital airlift of food.

“We can only suppose it is maybe to put pressure on the Bosnian delegates” during the partition talks, the Belgian officer said of the latest attacks.

U.N. monitors reported that 1,500 artillery shells fell on Sarajevo the previous day, killing at least seven people.

Despite the Serbs’ rebuff of the EC proposals and increasing signs of belligerence on the ground, EC mediator Lord Owen and his U.N. counterpart, Thorvald Stoltenberg, soldiered on with the 16-month-old negotiations after the host ministers left.

Owen insisted that he and Stoltenberg are prepared to mediate as long as necessary if they detect genuine willingness to resolve the conflict. He insisted that the gap between the Serbs and the Bosnian government is “so small it is tragic to enter the Christmas period with a war raging.”

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman drafted a new map for ethnic division that would have given the government the one-third share of territory it described as an absolute minimum for Muslim survival in the event of partitioning.

But the Muslim-led government rejected the new formula because it failed to meet demands for territory in eastern Bosnia from which hundreds of thousands of Muslims were “ethnically cleansed.”

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic reiterated his government’s opposition to ethnic segregation but said the leadership was forced to accept it because the international community has refused to intervene to break the Serbian sieges or to lift an arms embargo to allow Bosnians to break it themselves.

But the latest Serb-Croat offer was unacceptable, he said, because it gave no ground toward restoring land links among six Muslim enclaves allegedly under U.N. protection. In fact, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac, Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde are encircled by Serbian artillery and cut off from each other.

“The enclaves in eastern Bosnia are not viable and are destined to fade away or die as the populations are forced to leave,” Silajdzic said of the besieged towns.

He also accused Karadzic of “backtracking” on a September agreement to put Sarajevo under U.N. administration for at least two years.

Claes confirmed that the Serbs were again seeking ethnic division of Sarajevo as part of any peace accord, a position he deemed “regrettable.”

Differences remained between the government and the Croatian rebels who hold about 20% of Bosnian territory, in addition to the 70% overrun by Karadzic’s rebels. But both Silajdzic and EC officials indicated that those disputes could be resolved if the more divisive issues of eastern Bosnia and Sarajevo were surmountable.

Britain’s Foreign Office minister of state, Douglas Hogg, said that Milosevic appeared more eager to make territorial concessions than did Karadzic, referring to what several conference sources described as “a difference in tone” between the Serbian allies.

But because Karadzic’s self-styled Serb Republic is dependent on Belgrade for the food, fuel and weapons needed to wage war, their ostensible disagreement appeared to be a good-cop, bad-cop routine.