Warring Parties Again Delay Bosnia Cease-Fire : Balkans: Serbs continue expulsions while Muslim government fights to expand territory.

Bosnian Serbs continued to round up and expel Muslim women and children and detain draft-age men in northern Bosnia on Tuesday while officials in Sarajevo failed for the second day to agree on the start of a U.S.-brokered cease-fire.

In a serious blow to the fledgling peace process, the scheduled truce was again delayed when the Bosnian government said the electricity lighting Sarajevo homes for the first time in months was inadequate.

After three hours of reportedly hostile meetings, the Muslim-led government said it is willing to enter a truce at 12:01 a.m. Thursday if additional repairs bring in more electrical power.

But Bosnian Serb officials, who had been prepared to begin the cease-fire Monday and Tuesday, abruptly said they are not authorized to accept the cease-fire offer and would have to consult their leaders.

“The danger here is you can’t keep putting this off for 24 hours and then another 24 hours,” said one foreign official familiar with the negotiations.

There was speculation among U.N. officials that the delay was designed to allow Bosnian government forces and their Croatian allies to consolidate battlefield gains, including the Bosnian Serb-held town of Mrkonjic Grad.

Government forces were reported late Tuesday to have taken the town, strategic because it straddles road access from Sarajevo, the capital, to Bihac in the northwest, and Croatian television showed pictures purportedly of Croatian soldiers cruising the town in tanks.

In Bihac, a city under siege by Bosnian Serbs until two months ago, talk of an eventual cease-fire was greeted with cynicism early this morning.

At a small cafe, several off-duty government soldiers scoffed when asked about the truce, saying neither side really wants one. The mayor of Bihac, Adnan Alagic, joined them. He was also pessimistic.

“It is the West that wants this cease-fire, but the West doesn’t understand what it is like to have Serbs living in your country,” he said. “We have known it for 600 years, and you can see what it has been like the last four.”

The United Nations, meanwhile, announced Tuesday that Yasushi Akashi, the civilian head of the U.N. operation in the former Yugoslav federation, will be replaced at the end of the month.

Akashi was widely criticized by U.S. and Bosnian government officials for his reluctance to use force to protect peacekeepers and U.N.-designated “safe areas.”

In addition to the continued fighting, U.N. officials reported that a new and brutal round of “ethnic cleansing” is driving people from their homes.

An estimated 10,000 Muslims and Croats have been expelled in the last four days from towns surrounding Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serbs’ principal stronghold, in what U.N. officials described as the final push to cleanse northern Bosnia-Herzegovina of non-Serbs. An additional 9,000 expulsions were expected in the next days.

Aid officials said the expulsions were being carried out by paramilitary units under the direction of Zeljko Raznjatovic, one of the war’s most notorious figures. Known as Arkan, Raznjatovic stands accused of numerous atrocities.

Arkan arrived in the town of Sanski Most on Sept. 21, leading a convoy of buses with license plates from Vukovar, a town in Serb-held Croatia, and began rounding up Muslims and Croats, U.N. officials said, citing reports from the refugees.

Those seized were held in what one official called provisional concentration camps until bused to the front line, where they were forced to cross a river and march through woods to government-held territory.

Men of draft age were separated from their families, and as many as 5,000 have not been heard from since, said Mans Nyberg, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The tragedy of the Muslims and Croats of the Banja Luka area contrasted with the improvements registered in Sarajevo, where delighted households had electricity and natural gas for the first time in nearly six months.

The rare sight of scattered lights in the night’s blackness sparkled from Sarajevo neighborhoods, and the sounds of television sets carried through the streets.

In Azra Mrehic’s house, the family was delirious at having electricity, gas and, by special fortune, water too. Mrehic, a music teacher, cooked, did load after load of laundry and vacuumed well into the night.

“We turned on every machine in the house,” said her daughter, Sanja. “No one can believe it will last very long.”

With a supply of only 20 megawatts, however, residents were being told to limit their use to a few hours and a few appliances a day.

And that short supply became the sticking point when Bosnian government and Serbian representatives met Tuesday night to discuss the cease-fire. Earlier in the day, government officials said they considered the conditions they had demanded before a cease-fire--the restoration of utilities--had been met.

But Tuesday night they said they wanted electricity restored to about 30 to 40 megawatts, the level it had reached last May before the supply was severed by Serbs.

Times staff writer Dean E. Murphy in Bihac contributed to this report.