Mostar’s Muslims, Croats Meet U.N. Arms Deadline : Balkans: Tanks, artillery are pulled back. Even small weapons are silent. Citizens can safely stroll the streets.

Exhausted by a conflict that has shattered both sides, Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats eagerly capitulated Monday to a U.N. deadline for withdrawing heavy weapons from central Bosnian war zones.

U.N. officials in this ethnically divided, devastated front-line city said they were satisfied that the Muslim-led government forces and Croatian fighters had pulled back tanks and howitzers from a long, serpentine exclusion zone or surrendered them to U.N. containment.

More surprising to many of the war-weary residents of Mostar has been the virtual halt in small-arms fire. This has allowed civilians to creep out of their cellars and stroll the debris-strewn streets with a modicum of security for the first time in almost a year.

“We’re all hoping this is really peace. It’s so much better now that we can go outside and take a walk with our children without worrying we’ll be killed,” said Zaklina Juric, drinking up the early spring sunshine with her two toddlers.

Many people here, Croats on the west bank and Muslims expelled to the east, remain highly skeptical that the bloodletting is over. They harbor deep resentment over the senseless killing and destruction that has ruined so many lives.

But coming on the heels of a cease-fire in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, that has lasted almost four weeks, the sudden calm along this most bitter fault line between Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims has added momentum to the search for an overall settlement of the 2-year-old Bosnian conflict. It has raised the first serious hopes among civilians that their suffering may be drawing to an end.

Negotiations between Bosnian and Croatian officials on the terms of a new confederation agreed to in principle in Washington last week were reported by American mediators to be making progress as they got under way in Vienna, a further sign the political leaders are genuinely working toward peace.

And in northern Bosnia, U.N. troops from Sweden and Denmark pushed through to Tuzla’s airport with tanks and other hardware, said the peacekeepers’ spokesman in Sarajevo, Maj. Rob Annink.

The arrival of the 500 Scandinavian troops was a major step on the road to reopening the airport for a humanitarian airlift to feed the needy in the largest government-held region left in Bosnia.

Bosnian government troops have promised to hand the airport over to U.N. operation in exchange for assurances from the Serbs who command nearby high ground that they will not target incoming planes.

More than 800,000 people, mostly Muslims and many of them refugees from eastern enclaves subjected to “ethnic cleansing,” are trapped in the Tuzla area and cut off by fighting on all sides from regular supplies of food, fuel and medicine.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic agreed under pressure from Russia last week to allow U.N. relief workers to fly in survival goods for the region besieged by his forces.

A similar airlift to Sarajevo has been in operation for 21 months and has kept alive the capital’s 380,000 residents, who remain cut off from the rest of the world by encircling Serbian rebels.

U.N. officials reported relative calm throughout Bosnia on Monday, with the exception of the town of Maglaj, where Serbs have been pounding the Muslim enclave while international attention has focused elsewhere.

The Bosnian Croat army, known as the HVO, began withdrawing its heavy artillery a day ahead of Monday’s noon deadline, U.N. officials in Mostar said. Huge convoys of camouflage-painted troop carriers belonging to the army of neighboring Croatia could be seen plying the roads between the central Bosnian conflict areas and the Dalmatian coast late Sunday, presumably evacuating the troops and equipment Zagreb officials had long denied sending here.

“We have fully complied with the deadline,” said HVO spokesman Veso Vegar.

Vegar said four tanks and hundreds of other artillery pieces had been moved out of the exclusion zone and that weaponry in other hot spots, like Gornji Vakuf and Vitez, had been turned over to U.N. control.

Asked if he believed the Muslim-led government forces had likewise adhered to the truce brokered 10 days ago, Vegar conceded that the Croatian forces “really don’t have much fear of attack from the Muslims.”

A senior U.N. officer from the Spanish battalion deployed to southwest Bosnia said a new atmosphere has enveloped the region, adding that it is imperative for the international community to seize the moment. “From the military point of view, this is the first time I see both sides with some kind of willingness to make peace,” the officer said. “They are tired. They’ve been fighting for two years. It’s a very delicate moment, which is why we have to move quickly to implement the cease-fire as soon as possible.”

The theory here, as well as in Sarajevo, is that the cease-fires are holding now because all three populations are equally sickened by the war and that heavy artillery should be swept out or rendered inoperable before extremists on any side have a chance to upset the tense, breath-catching silence.

Sarajevo’s cease-fire was arranged by U.N. officials against a backdrop of threatened allied air strikes, if artillery remained within a 12-mile exclusion zone. After the horrifying Feb. 5 bombing of a central Sarajevo marketplace in which 68 people were killed, Serbian rebels acted on the advice of allied Russia and mostly complied.

No threats of aerial bombardment were raised against intransigent Muslims or Croats here. But a growing sense of disgust with the killings between two populations that have lived together for centuries appeared to compel fighters to take advantage of the opportunity to quietly call it a draw.

“There comes a point where people have to change their minds, whether they want to or not,” said Braco Bracic, a 48-year-old soldier on the HVO side.

Before the latest peacemaking ventures, more than 200,000 Bosnians had been killed and 2 million made homeless in the conflict.