Bosnia Says Utility Delays Won’t Affect Truce

Prospects for a cease-fire vital to ending Bosnia’s 3 1/2-year war firmed Saturday when the government said technical delays in restoring electricity and gas in Sarajevo would not affect its timing.

Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic said gas from Russia was due to start flowing today through an international pipeline that crosses territory controlled by Serbs.

With repair work to electricity lines still in progress, Silajdzic said purely technical delays would not prevent the cease-fire from starting Tuesday.

Bosnia has made the restoration of utilities, which the Bosnian Serbs cut last April, a condition for the cease-fire that mediators hope will be a first step toward ending the war.

Already looking to the future, Silajdzic told an international conference in Warsaw that his government needs aid of $12 billion for postwar reconstruction.

In Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, newspapers seen as the voice of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic forecast that the cease-fire will bring an end to the conflict that began when Bosnian Serbs opposed Bosnia’s independence from the former Yugoslav federation.

“An avalanche of peace has begun to move, and it will be difficult to stop it in the weeks to come,” the daily Borba wrote in a commentary. “It is time to lay down arms and sit at the negotiating table for as long as is necessary.”

Politika, the rump Yugoslavia’s most influential newspaper, said the cease-fire deal endorsed by Milosevic “indicates . . . the end of the civil war in Bosnia.”

Milosevic is negotiating on behalf of Bosnian Serbs who held out for more than a year against a peace plan for Bosnia crafted by the so-called Contact Group--the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia.

The editorials stressed that peace negotiations will be difficult “and we can expect good news and bad.”

But political sources said they underlined Milosevic’s commitment to ending the war and lifting the burden of United Nations sanctions from Yugoslavia.

Last-minute fighting for territory in northwest, northern and central Bosnia continued between government and Bosnian Serb forces in the run-up to the cease-fire.

Bosnian media said government forces had captured 20 square miles of the Mt. Ozren area of northern Bosnia and were advancing on the Serb-held town of Doboj, which Serbian sources said was being shelled.