Standoff Over Gorazde Thwarts Bosnia Peace Initiative : Balkans: Serbs renege on promise to leave U.N. haven. Muslim government refuses to renegotiate terms.

Bosnian Serbs and the Muslim-led government hunkered down for a long standoff Monday when the rebels violated a second promise to withdraw all their armed forces from Gorazde and the government reaffirmed that it will reject wider peace proposals.

The rebel army’s chief of staff, Gen. Manojlo Milovanovic, had signed an agreement over the weekend with the U.N. Protection Force here pledging that all gun-toting Serbs, in army uniforms or otherwise, would be out of Gorazde by 6 p.m. Sunday.

But most of the 150 armed Serbs masquerading as policemen remained in the U.N.-protected “safe area,” U.N. spokesman Maj. Rob Annink said.

The Bosnian Serb news agency, SRNA, accused the Bosnian government of preventing the pullout by refusing to sign the U.N.-mediated agreement outlining the terms of the Serbian withdrawal.

Annink said the deal made no demands of the Bosnian government side and said Milovanovic had not insisted on any additional signatures when he approved the terms Saturday with the U.N. commander for Bosnia, British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose.

The agreement was in any case a restatement of the Serbs’ promise of a month ago to leave a 1.9-mile exclusion zone proclaimed around Gorazde and backed by the threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization air strikes if the Serbs failed to comply.

Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic said he is refusing to sign any renegotiated terms of the NATO ultimatum on principle.

“There was an ultimatum, and a U.N. resolution,” an exasperated Silajdzic said. “If you start renegotiating the terms of an ultimatum and signing new agreements about what has been ordered, where does it end?”

The exclusion zone was proclaimed around Gorazde’s city center after Serbian forces overran nearly half of the U.N.-declared haven last month, driving thousands of Muslim civilians from their homes in the conquered areas and killing hundreds in a fierce bombardment that drew two token NATO air strikes and raised the threat of others.

The Serbian forces were supposed to have withdrawn all infantry from the zone and all heavy weapons from within a 12-mile radius of the city. U.N. sources also confirm that some artillery pieces remain within the wider exclusion zone.

Silajdzic said the Bosnian government will continue to insist on the resolution of the Gorazde standoff before resuming negotiations aimed at an overall cease-fire for Bosnia.

Annink said the Serbs have informed the U.N. mission here that its movements will be restricted until 570 Serbian residents of Gorazde are delivered to Serb-held territory and government forces vacate a hill in the exclusion zone.

Annink said U.N. military officials are bewildered by the demand that no government troops be allowed on Mala Biserna hill because it isn’t considered strategic.

Another U.N. spokesman, Maj. Dacre Holloway, said the demand for moving Serbian civilians is being viewed as a “political ploy” because the United Nations has received no requests from Serbs still in Gorazde for relocation.

U.N. officials also reported Serbian rebel interference with efforts to deliver aid to another pocket held by supporters of the Bosnian government, according to the British news agency Reuters. Peter Kessler, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said in Zagreb, the capital of neighboring Croatia, that Bosnian Serbs halted 39 trucks with 500 tons of aid destined for the enclave of Bihac in western Bosnia.

Despite the Gorazde impasse, both the rebel Serbs and the Bosnian government set off for meetings in southern France being organized by Western mediators seeking a negotiated solution to the Balkans crisis. Hopes for any breakthrough at those talks seemed dim, however, with the government refusing to contemplate a nationwide cease-fire, which would be a logical first step to an overall peace treaty.

The United States, Russia and the European Union are insisting that the Bosnian factions accept an ethnic partitioning of the country, with the Serbs getting 49% of Bosnian territory and a new Croatian-Muslim federation being accorded 51%. Because Serbian forces now hold more than 70%, they have been reluctant to begin negotiations certain to lead to a reduction of their spoils.

The government, which objects in principle to an ethnic division, is also not eager to capitulate after resisting the nationalist quest for ethnically pure territories for more than two years.

But its mostly Muslim forces are exhausted and poorly armed because of a U.N. embargo on weapons deliveries to all former Yugoslav republics.