Bosnia Premier Defends Assaults : Balkans: He blames international community, saying it ignores Serb aggression. Political solutions appear distant.

As Bosnian government and rebel Serb troops continued heavy fighting on Tuesday, Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic laid blame on the international community for the unraveling cease-fire in his country.

Silajdzic stopped short of pronouncing the 11-week-old truce dead. But he said the military attacks launched Monday by his government in central and northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina were an inevitable outgrowth of what he regards as the world’s indifference toward Bosnian Serb aggression.

“If there is a message (from the new fighting), it is that this can go on for 10 years, or 15 years or 20 years,” Silajdzic said in an interview during a visit to the Croatian capital. “We are doing what we can with what we have. By surviving, we are doing well.”

He complained that the cease-fire, which began in January as part of a peace initiative by former President Jimmy Carter, had strengthened the rebel Serbs’ grip on 70% of Bosnian territory and distracted international attention from the victims of the bloody conflict.

Silajdzic pointed to a string of Bosnian Serb violations of the cease-fire over the last several weeks, including attacks on U.N. aircraft at Sarajevo airport, and said his government was left with no choice but to retaliate.

He expressed little faith in stalled diplomatic efforts by the United States and others to end the war.

“The international community has a policy of containment here,” he said. “They say both sides are guilty . . . and they want us to sit pretty and do nothing. But they ignore what has been happening all the while in Bihac and in Sarajevo and elsewhere. The international community has to let us defend ourselves and bring an end to the war.”

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, meanwhile, was quoted in news reports from his headquarters near Sarajevo as calling on the world to stop the Bosnian government assault or prepare for the consequences.

If the fighting should resume, he said, “we are not going to accept any cease-fire or cessation of hostilities until we end the war.”

Bellicose comments by both Silajdzic and Karadzic came against a backdrop of growing pessimism at the United Nations about the future of talks seeking a political solution to the 3-year-old civil war.

U.N. officials said contacts between the warring sides have broken off entirely, and they expressed faint hope that they will resume any time soon.

“We are not optimistic at the moment in terms of securing an extension of the cease-fire beyond its present expiration on April 30,” said Michael Williams, spokesman for U.N. special envoy Yasushi Akashi, who was unable last week to persuade the two sides to even sit at the same table.

Western diplomats and military analysts described the new fighting, which began in the mountains of central and northeastern Bosnia on Monday and continued there Tuesday morning, as a warning salvo from the Bosnian government.

With less than six weeks until the cease-fire formally expires, the Muslim-led Bosnian forces are letting it be known that war lurks around the corner, analysts said.

The government forces are expected to make more military forays in the coming weeks in the hope of unnerving their opponents and recapturing world attention, they said.

“They are in a high-stakes game of escalation,” said Andrew S. Bair, a military analyst and former U.N. official. “If it goes much further, the cease-fire will have been overcome and you will have to go back a long way to re-establish any trust between the two sides.”

A Western diplomat in Zagreb said the Bosnian government has made it clear through diplomatic channels that it is unhappy with the longstanding peace proposal, which it has signed off on, and is unwilling to “give up its military option” while international mediators try to persuade the recalcitrant Bosnian Serbs to also accept the plan.

The Contact Group peace proposal--offered by the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Germany--would give each side control of about half the country, meaning the Bosnian Serbs would have to turn over large swaths of territory they now occupy.

Carter claimed to have made progress on the issue during his peace mission in December, but nothing has come of it since then, and the Bosnian Serbs say they still reject the plan.

“Everyone said this thing would last only until spring if nothing came of the Contact Group plan,” the diplomat said. “Well, the weather is getting better, and talks on the plan are going nowhere.”

U.N. officials said Tuesday that heavy fighting continued until midmorning in the Majevica hills near the government stronghold of Tuzla and around Mt. Vlasic overlooking the central Bosnian town of Travnik.

The United Nations said that in the fighting Monday at least 25 Bosnian soldiers were killed and 80 wounded in a Bosnian Serb counterattack on Tuzla. Croatian news reports, however, placed the number of dead at 50 and the wounded at more than 200.