Balkan Foes Agree to Discuss Peace Plan, Envoy Says : Diplomacy: U.S. negotiator expresses caution about the Geneva meeting but calls the three-way talks a ‘step forward.’ NATO halts attacks on Bosnian Serb targets.

Top officials from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and the rump Yugoslavia will meet next week in Geneva for the first time in two years to plan a peace conference aimed at ending the bloody Balkan warfare, the chief U.S. negotiator in the region said Friday.

The announcement came as NATO warplanes halted their punishing air campaign against Bosnian Serb military targets after three days of intense bombing. The unprecedented aerial assault was suspended while U.N. military officials met with the Bosnian Serb army commander to discuss withdrawal of heavy weapons from around the besieged Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

Against the backdrop of a Balkan landscape bearing the scars of numerous failed peace initiatives, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke expressed excitement about the upcoming U.S.-brokered meeting in Geneva but cautioned against expecting too much from it.

“I want to stress that it will be short,” he said in a break in marathon preparatory talks with Serbian officials in this Serbian and Yugoslav capital. “And I want to stress that it will not be the conference that ends the war in Bosnia. But we believe it will be another step forward--away from war and toward peace.”

The session, expected late in the week, will bring together senior delegations from all three warring countries for the first time since 1993. Holbrooke said the meeting will involve the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and Yugoslavia, which consists of Serbia and Montenegro.

Delegations also will be present from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia--known collectively as the Contact Group--which have been unsuccessfully pushing a peace plan for the region since last year.

“We hope it will lay the groundwork for an international peace conference to be held later at the highest levels,” Holbrooke said of the Geneva meeting. “We hope that it will lay out the principles that will govern the search for peace.”

The Bosnian Serbs will be represented by Yugoslav Foreign Minister Milan Milutinovic under terms of an agreement signed this week with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic that gives Milosevic the authority to broker an agreement on the Bosnian Serbs’ behalf.

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Analysts said it will be the highest-level meeting involving all three countries since September, 1993, when an effort by former peace envoys Lord David Owen and Cyrus R. Vance collapsed. Significantly, it will be the first such meeting since Milosevic emerged this week as the undisputed negotiator for all Serbs, including the most combative--and least conciliatory--ones in Bosnia.

“It is probably the beginning of the end of the story,” said Milan Protic, director of the Center for Serbian Studies in Belgrade. “It is setting the stage for the final settlement for peace.”

Diplomats and analysts said the current peace effort has a better hope for success than many previous attempts because all sides have already agreed to a partition of Bosnia, the most contentious component of any settlement. Under the agreement, the Bosnian Muslim-Croat federation would control 51% of the territory and the Bosnian Serbs 49%.

But at the same time, Bosnia remains the stumbling block to any settlement. Holbrooke said there is no consensus about where to draw the lines through a divided Bosnia, nor is there any clear notion of how to deal with Sarajevo.

A proposed map of a partitioned Bosnia drawn up last year by the Contact Group has been shelved, while it appears increasingly likely that the once-multiethnic Bosnian capital will end up as the 1990s successor to Cold War Berlin--severed in half.

“The toughest issues are over land. That is what the war has been about,” Holbrooke said. “Everyone’s 51% and everyone’s 49% are different. That is what this negotiation is going to be about.”

He said the three-day bombardment by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the biggest military action ever by the alliance, was not linked to his shuttle diplomacy. But U.S. and other officials acknowledged that the pounding helped convince the Bosnian Serbs that continued fighting would leave them worse off than a negotiated settlement.

A Bosnian Serb artillery attack on Sarajevo this week, killing at least 37 people, led to the NATO military action. But in a setback for the hoped-for peace process, U.N. officials said late Friday that little progress had been made in the talks to remove the Bosnian Serb heavy weapons from the hills around Sarajevo.

The halt in bombing was ordered Friday so NATO could assess damage from the first 60 hours of bombardment of Bosnian Serb positions and to allow for the talks between Bosnian Serb army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and Gen. Bernard Janvier, commander of U.N. forces in the Balkans.

“There has been a pause in conducting air strikes while we assess the situation on the ground and in the political environment,” U.N. spokesman Philip Arnold said at U.N. headquarters in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. “We can recommence on order. The planes are [still] in the air.”

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The generals’ talks began Friday afternoon in the rump Yugoslavia, near the Bosnian border town of Zvornik, U.N. sources said. U.N. officials said Janvier was to press Mladic to agree to the removal of heavy artillery from a 12 1/2-mile radius around Sarajevo, the “weapons exclusion zone,” and there were early signs that Mladic might be ready to agree.

A report from Greece, a close ally of the Serbs, quoted Greek Defense Minister Yerasimos Arsenis as saying Mladic was ready to comply. And NATO officials in Naples, Italy, confirmed reports that movement had been detected within the exclusion zone, although it was unclear if the arms were being withdrawn.

But late Friday night, U.N. officials said the talks were not going smoothly and that Janvier would not return to Zagreb until today because of the bogged-down discussions. They described the session as tense and dominated by an angry tirade from Mladic.

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The Muslim-led but secular Bosnian government expressed alarm at the break in the NATO air strikes, particularly in the face of the lack of progress over the weapons removal. “We don’t think it is appropriate to allow for any pause unless there is a clear commitment [from the Serbs] to remove or destroy those weapons,” Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey told reporters in Sarajevo.

Earlier Friday, U.N. officials said Bosnian Serb targets hit late Thursday and early Friday included an ammunition depot near the eastern enclave of Gorazde; an antiaircraft surface-to-air missile site near Sokolac in eastern Bosnia; radar tracking devices near Foca, southeast of Sarajevo, and a T-64 tank and artillery piece near Mostar.

He said alliance aircraft had returned to many of the same targets that were hit Wednesday, including ammunition and supply depots, and air defense systems around the Sarajevo area. NATO planes also provided close air support for the U.N. rapid-reaction force, which attacked Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo using artillery.

Unlike the first day, said British Royal Air Force Group Capt. Trevor Murray, chief of the NATO Southern Command air operations, no radar-guided Serbian antiaircraft missile batteries challenged alliance planes and there were no reports of the firing of more primitive, yet highly effective, shoulder-held missiles.

It was such a missile that hit a French Mirage 2000 attack aircraft Wednesday. NATO officials said search-and-rescue operations for the Mirage’s two pilots would continue.

Murphy reported from Belgrade and Wilkinson from Zagreb. Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Naples and Art Pine and Stanley Meisler in Washington contributed to this report.

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The Peace Process

Next week’s negotiations in Geneva will focus on how to split control of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 51% to the Muslims and Croats and 49% to the Serbs. The talks are only the first step in the process.

Step 1: The talks will attempt to develop basic principles for a settlement. The foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and the rump Yugoslavia will represent the sides in the war. Serb-led Yugoslavia will represent the Bosnian Serbs at the table. The talks are expected to last about a day.

Step 2: A top-level peace conference, date to be decided, will be held to iron out specifics. U.S. officials say Serbs and the Bosnian government remain sharply divided over which parts of the country each side should get.