Serbs Pin Down 400 U.N. Troops : Balkans: Battles around three ‘safe areas’ threaten more peacekeepers and Muslim civilians. Bosnian Serb leader warns against trying to rescue hostages.

Fighting surged Thursday around three U.N.-designated “safe areas” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with about 400 peacekeepers and 60,000 Muslim civilians and refugees being trapped in Gorazde, hundreds of explosions reported around Srebrenica and renewed shelling occurring in Tuzla.

Even as Bosnian Serbs grabbed what may be their first civilian hostage--a Swede--their leader, Radovan Karadzic, warned the West against using military might to free about 370 peacekeeper-hostages held by rebel Serb gunmen.

In his first public comments since his army seized its United Nations captives in retaliation for NATO air strikes, Karadzic told Bosnian Serb television that the solution to the hostage standoff that has paralyzed the world’s major powers must be political.

“Any attempt to liberate them by force would end in catastrophe,” he said at his headquarters in the town of Pale.

“It would be a blood bath.”

In other Balkans-related developments Thursday:

* Bosnian Serb gunmen apparently took their first civilian hostage, a Swedish-born U.N. official detained in the Serb-controlled northern town of Banja Luka, where rebel Serb militia in recent weeks have gone on a rampage expelling non-Serbs and torching Catholic churches. U.N. officials said they had been assured that the Swedish civilian would not be harmed.

* France and Britain readied plans for a well-armed mobile strike force to protect U.N. peacekeepers in the future. But President Clinton and other officials in his Administration expressed concern about this allied plan, fearing that it might put in harm’s way any U.S. troops assisting U.N. peacekeepers as they move into positions that can be more easily defended.

* Top defense officials from the United States and its major Western allies planned an emergency meeting Saturday in Paris to forge plans for reinforcing U.N. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia.

* A senior U.S. envoy pressed Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for his cooperation in ending the crisis by recognizing the country he once tried to destroy, Bosnia-Herzegovina. New incentives reportedly were offered to Milosevic, prompting complaints from the Muslim-led Bosnian government that too much ground now was being given to the Serb leader.

The Front Lines

The Bosnian Serb army shelled Gorazde, a Muslim enclave about 30 miles southeast of Sarajevo, and battled government forces for control of U.N. posts left vacant when the peacekeepers were taken hostage.

U.N. officials fear that the Bosnian Serbs will soon overrun the city where 400 peacekeepers are hunkered down in shelters.

Shelling of Gorazde last year was halted only when the United Nations ordered air strikes by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

That option has evidently been abandoned since the taking of the hostages.

U.N. spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Coward said it was unlikely the United Nations could rescue its men from Gorazde in time.

“I think it would take some time to mount an operation of that nature,” he said at a Sarajevo news conference. “We do have some assets that could be used, but whether we could achieve the [rescue] in the space of time to safeguard all of them, I wonder.”

Meantime, U.N. officials reported 200 explosions around the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, another U.N. “safe area” for civilians. A battle also raged in north-central Bosnia, around the town of Doboj.

The officials said three civilians were wounded Thursday in renewed shelling of Tuzla, Bosnia’s second-largest city. Seventy-one people were killed there last week and 200 were wounded in Serb shelling of the government-held city.

In the Bosnian Serb-besieged capital of Sarajevo, aid workers warned that food shortages are looming, and senior U.N. commanders are considering the use of force to open lines into the city.

Kris Janowski, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said stocks were running dangerously low in Sarajevo.

Bosnian Serbs for weeks have tightened their stranglehold on Sarajevo and government-held enclaves elsewhere in Bosnia by barring food convoys and shutting down a humanitarian airlift that supplies the capital.

The Diplomacy

In Belgrade, senior U.S. envoy Robert Frasure continued to try to persuade Milosevic, the Serbian president, to recognize Bosnia in exchange for suspension of international sanctions that have strangled the economy of the rump Yugoslavia for the past three years.

The two sides were said to be close to agreement, as they have been for some time, but with details on the ending of an oil embargo, access to international financial institutions and other matters as yet unresolved.

Frasure’s boss, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, reported Wednesday that little progress had been made toward clinching the deal with Milosevic, whose nationalist rhetoric helped foment the violent disintegration of what once was Yugoslavia.

But Christopher issued a clear warning to Milosevic, challenging him to mediate the release of hostages or face permanent isolation from the rest of the world.

“This is now an opportunity for President Milosevic to take sides with the rest of the civilized world in condemnation of the Pale Serbs, to help us in obtaining release of the hostages,” Christopher said. “His failure to do so will be read very adversely as to his long-term intentions. I call on him to take those steps that are valuable to the international community.”

Frasure, who is representing the five-nation Contact Group mediating the Bosnian conflict in which an estimated 200,000 people have died, was to remain in Belgrade at least one more day on the chance Milosevic might budge.

The package being offered Milosevic reportedly includes a number of concessions, and that prospect angered the Bosnians.

“There is too much sweetener in the pot, and it is quite evident that Milosevic cannot or will not control [Bosnian Serb] forces on the ground. The reward is too much and the benefits are too little,” said Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia’s ambassador to the United Nations. Sacirbey was named foreign minister Thursday to replace Irfan Ljubijankic, who was killed last weekend when his helicopter was shot down by Serbs.

The Allies

France, which has lost the greatest number of U.N. peacekeepers to the Balkans debacle, is spearheading the formation of a rapid reaction force of as many as 5,000 men backed by helicopters and armor. Its purpose would be to protect peacekeepers.

“France will no longer tolerate its soldiers being humiliated, wounded or killed with impunity by those who have chosen to oppose their mission of peace and protecting civilians,” President Jacques Chirac told mourners at the funeral of two French soldiers killed by Bosnian Serbs.

But in Billings, Mont., Clinton and his advisers said the United States remains willing to provide ground troops for a limited redeployment of peacekeeping troops, but not for an open-ended mission such as the French-proposed rapid reaction force.

In an interview with the Billings Gazette, Clinton said: “The question has arisen: If the U.N. forces want to stay in Bosnia but have to relocate so they can concentrate themselves in more secure areas, if they needed help from us, would we be willing to give it?

“My instinct is, as long as the mission was strictly limited for a very narrow purpose and it was something that we could do for them that they couldn’t do for themselves, upon proper consultation with Congress, I would be inclined to do that,” the President said. “But they [the U.S. troops] would not be going there to get involved in a war or be part of the U.N. mission.”

Meantime, Britain has already begun moving new troops into central Bosnia, and Germany has offered to supply noncombat forces to help reposition peacekeepers.

The proposal for the rapid-deployment force will be discussed by the defense chiefs of more than a dozen Western nations, including the United States, Saturday in Paris.

Also high on the defense chiefs’ agenda will be a proposal by British and French strategists to consolidate existing peacekeeping forces in safer positions, where they can protect themselves more easily with less danger that they will be taken hostage by Bosnian Serbs.

U.S. officials said it was not immediately clear what the weekend session would produce. The Administration has said it would send equipment--and may send some ground troops temporarily--to help the widely scattered U.N. peacekeeping forces move back to safer areas.

*

But Washington will also insist that any military operations be under the control of NATO, not the United Nations.

U.S. officials said Thursday that they hope to be able to influence decisions at Saturday’s meeting to square with the limits that Clinton has placed on U.S. participation in any effort to strengthen U.N. peacekeeping forces.

The Administration took steps to try to distance itself from the French plan to create a rapid-deployment force, reiterating in briefings that it had no intention of sending U.S. troops to perform a combat role.

Officials said the White House was so adamant about that prohibition that the United States already has told the Europeans that it will not even provide logistic support, radar-warning or intelligence to help support a rapid-deployment force.

The Pentagon also disclosed Thursday that U.S. troops in Europe will begin 10 days of maneuvers in Germany to train for possible redeployment of U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia. The exercise, to be held at Grafenwoehr army base, will involve 1,900 soldiers.

Wilkinson reported from Belgrade and Kempster from Madrid. Times staff writers Doyle McManus in Billings and Art Pine in Washington also contributed to this report.

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Hostages’ Locations

The Bosnian Serbs have detained U.N. peacekeepers in response to NATO air raids. The greatest concentration of hostages is around Sarajevo.

Serb-held Croatia

Bosnian Serb

Muslim-Croat federation

Serb Demands:

No further NATO air attacks on Serb positions.

Sarajevo and five other U.N. “safe areas” be demilitarized.

No more U.N. forces.

Hostages Held Near Sarajevo

1. Ilijas: 8 Canadians 2. Krivoglavci: 11 Ukraninians (believed taken to Pale) 3. Rajlovac: 20 French (believed taken to Vogoscal) 4. Poijine: 21 French 5. Vrbanja: 10 French (believed taken to Lukavica) 6. Hresa: 9 Russians 7. Vidikovaci: 12 Russians 8. Sumarska: 14 French 9. Uzdonice: 13 Russians 10. Lukavica: 40 French 11. Nedzarici: 10 French 12. Krupac: 10 French 13. Ilidza: 32 Ukrainians (believed taken to Pale) 14. Osijek: 21 French 15. Bare: 18 French

Background

Muslims: They control the Bosnian government. Their initial goal was to maintain a unified Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Serbs: They want their own state, with Serbia and parts of Croatia linked with the land they’ve seized in Bosnia.

Sources: UNPROFOR, Associated Press