Bosnia Truce Falters as Peace Plan Rebuffed

A tenuous cease-fire agreement in Bosnia faltered Wednesday after international mediators failed to win Serbian acceptance of a peace plan and the Bosnian army broke off meetings with its enemy.

At the same time, international aid workers sounded the alarm over the likely starvation of refugees in the besieged Muslim enclave of Bihac, the scene in recent days of heavy shelling.

Underscoring the danger of renewed warfare, envoys from the five-nation Contact Group said they had emerged empty-handed after ending two days of meetings with Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslim-led government and Serbian rebels based in the nearby town of Pale. The diplomats’ mission, already 6 months old, was to persuade the Serbs to accept a plan for dividing Bosnian territory.

The Bosnian government, in its dealings Wednesday with the Contact Group--made up of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia--urged the diplomats to impose a two-month deadline on the Serbs for their acceptance or rejection of the plan.

The Bosnian army, meanwhile, stormed out of one meeting with Serbian rebels and canceled others in what a U.N. spokesman described as a protest against delays in the peace process.

The meetings are of middle-level officers assigned to iron out details of the cessation-of-hostilities agreement, a series of measures that build on the cease-fire that went into effect Jan. 1.

Fighting flared again Wednesday in Bihac, a government-controlled “safe area” in northwest Bosnia, where dissident Muslims and their Croatian Serb allies are battling government forces.

Blocked supply routes into Bihac have put about 200,000 people in danger of starvation, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program said Wednesday.