Broken Bosnia Truce a Sign of Futility : Balkans: Ten are reported killed and 100 wounded in Sarajevo alone a day into holiday cease-fire. Observers say peace remains elusive because the West’s mediation is misguided.

A Serbian artillery barrage against Sarajevo and fierce Muslim-Croatian fighting on Christmas Day pounded out a painful message: Despite more than two years of diplomatic arm-twisting in a dozen European cities, Western mediators in the Balkans crisis have almost nothing to show for their work.

A holiday truce brokered by the European Community was ignored from its start, with United Nations officials reporting at least 10 dead and 100 wounded in Sarajevo alone in the first 24 hours of this latest cease-fire.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, on Europe’s doorstep, has descended into a medieval-style blood bath. Serbs and Croats in neighboring Croatia have used two years of a U.N.-enforced standoff to sharpen their swords for an imminent rematch. Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo endure ever more open repression. Even in Serbia, international sanctions have spurred a frightening anti-Western backlash that threatens an explosion of unrest and a search for targets for public outrage.

The year 1993 saw the cancer of aggressive nationalism spread irreversibly through the Balkans after the aim of mediation in Bosnia turned from reversing the previous year’s Serbian land grab to attempts to sate the rebels by carving up the country into ethnic fiefdoms.

EC negotiator Lord Owen has blamed Washington, sometimes quietly, sometimes in public, for eleventh-hour failures that have followed three junctures when he felt a negotiated settlement and peace were close at hand.

But diplomats, U.N. officials and others outside the European alliance who have watched the progressive dismantling first of the former Yugoslav federation, then of Bosnia and now of integrated Bosnian cities like Sarajevo and Mostar, suggest that peace has been elusive because the mediators’ mission has been misguided from the beginning.

No end will be brought to Europe’s deadliest siege in half a century, they say, by cajoling its perpetrators and sending food to its victims.

“As soon as the international community accepted the concept of ethnic division, it was all over for Bosnia,” said one of the few Western diplomats who occasionally ventures into the strife-torn country. “What is worse is that it won’t end in Bosnia. Now that we have legitimized ‘ethnic cleansing,’ we are going to be seeing it all over Eastern Europe.”

The year began with EC countries and the United States at odds over how to effectively intervene in the worsening conflict, in which as many as 250,000 have been killed and 2 million made homeless.

Washington was just emerging from the foreign-policy paralysis of a hotly contested election and expectations were high that President-elect Clinton would move decisively to curb the Balkan conflict. Word circulated swiftly after his inauguration that Clinton was displeased with the first formula for ethnic division crafted by Owen and his then-partner in the peace talks, U.N. special envoy Cyrus R. Vance.

The Vance-Owen plan called for dividing Bosnia into 10 provinces, with three each to be ruled by Serbs, Croats and the Muslim-led government, while the capital of Sarajevo would have been jointly administered and allowed to retain its multiethnic tradition.

Once the boundaries of ethnically defined provinces began to be drawn, many of the Croatian fighters, who, until then had sided with the government in defending Bosnia, found themselves destined to live in provinces that mediators were openly describing as “Muslim.”

The breakdown of the Croatian-Muslim alliance against the Serbian siege began as negotiators put finishing touches on the Vance-Owen plan and lobbied the three communities to endorse the proposal, which at least continued to recognize a single Bosnian state within prewar borders.

Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban approved immediately, as the plan would have given his self-proclaimed leadership in the southern city of Mostar control over nearly one-third of Bosnia, though Croats make up only 17% or so of the population.

Western pressure on Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic eventually compelled the Bosnian leadership to give up on the idea of a unified, integrated republic. When Owen and Vance promised tens of thousands of North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops would oversee the transition, Izetbegovic agreed to the carve-up.

Even Washington belatedly signed on, having found no support among European allies for military intervention to break the Serbian siege and having determined that Americans were more interested in domestic woes than a faraway foreign conflict.

That left only the Bosnian Serbs, who had instigated the bloodletting in April, 1992, by encircling Sarajevo with artillery and firing on civilians in hopes they would flee.

Vance and Owen embarked on a dizzying shuttle diplomacy, pressuring Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to get his Bosnian proxy Radovan Karadzic to acquiesce to the plan, which would have given Serbs, who were 31% of the prewar population, control over half the country.

Despite threats by Milosevic to cut off military and financial support, and in the face of renewed U.S. threats to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian government and launch air strikes on Serbian tanks and guns, Karadzic and his rogue parliament rejected the peace plan three times.

In May, to deflect further Western attempts to get Serbs to comply, Karadzic’s self-styled Serb Republic held a referendum to show it had popular support. Rebel leaders in Pale, the former Olympic ski town outside Sarajevo, claimed the vote showed 96% of Serbs opposed to the Vance-Owen plan.

Western warnings of military intervention also proved to be idle threats. After Secretary of State Warren Christopher toured Western Europe and found no backing for Clinton’s “lift and strike” agenda, Washington retreated and joined its allies to put forth a new plan to create six U.N.-protected safe areas for Bosnia’s embattled Muslims.

Peace talks resumed in Geneva. But Vance withdrew and even Owen acknowledged in June that negotiations he had brokered for 10 months had become an alibi for international reluctance to enforce a settlement.

Knowing there was no “or else” with which they could threaten any faction seen to be thwarting peace, Owen and his new U.N. partner, Thorvald Stoltenberg of Norway, invited combatants to submit their own proposals. Karadzic and Boban met secretly and drafted their own map, the subject of much talk and slight variation for six months.

Meantime, the Bosnian government’s authority continued to deteriorate and persistent fighting uprooted thousands more each month, making the prospect of surrender a conceivable alternative to fighting a losing war for the cause of an ethnic tolerance that fewer and fewer cared about.

But Sarajevo officials rejected the Serbian-Croatian division in September, saying they could not settle for the heavily damaged rump of territory ceded to the republic’s 2 million Muslims and supporters of multiethnic living--unless it was made economically viable. They insisted on access to the Adriatic Sea and on return of some eastern Bosnian territories.

At the latest negotiating session in Brussels last week, EC foreign ministers warned the Serbs that they could face tighter sanctions if they failed to grant the government the modicum of territory it demanded in exchange for peace. When Karadzic refused to discuss an EC proposal for improving humanitarian aid deliveries and backtracked on a promise to leave Sarajevo to U.N. administration, the 12 foreign ministers chastised him but left for their Christmas holidays without any discussion of punitive action.

The one achievement EC ministers claimed was getting combatants to reiterate their commitment to a cease-fire for Christmas--a holiday that stirs little excitement among Muslims and is celebrated two weeks later, according to the Orthodox Christian calendar, by Serbs.

A U.N. spokesman in the Bosnian capital reported one of the heaviest shelling barrages by Serbs in months early Saturday, and Muslims and Croats battled on through the volatile Lasva River valley after one of the deadliest government offensives of the war.

“Europe has demonstrated its feebleness,” Izetbegovic said of the failed peace talks in a Christmas Eve radio address.

His comments and those of Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic, the former foreign minister who has traveled the world beseeching the West to help Bosnia, have taken on an increasingly aggrieved, strident tone as their gravest forecasts of the dangers of unchecked nationalist violence have come true.

What began as a one-sided siege by a radical minority of Bosnia’s Serbs and Belgrade mercenaries sent to take land for a “Greater Serbia” has deteriorated after 21 months into a savage, three-way civil war. As the violence in Bosnia persists and new stirrings of nationalist aggression threaten Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia, the EC and the United Nations have tired of taking even the half measures they have applied to the crisis.

In Sarajevo, as well as in Belgrade, where Milosevic has directed the burning and brewing rebellions, few expect the outside world to stay engaged much longer. Britain and France last week threatened to pull out their considerable contingents from U.N. forces escorting aid in Bosnia, a move that would further undermine already frustrated delivery of aid.

Owen and Stoltenberg adjourned their roving peace forum until at least Jan. 15, though there was an air of finality hanging heavily over the Brussels talks. Belgian Foreign Minister Willy Claes, whose country holds the rotating EC presidency for another week, had warned prior to the session that it was “a last chance for peace.”

Indeed, prospects for a breakthrough appear far gloomier with the start of 1994, when Greece takes its turn in the EC presidency.

Greek Foreign Minister Karolos Papoulias has already promised Milosevic that Athens will work to get U.N. sanctions lifted from its Serbian allies.