Bosnia Foes Pull Back in Sarajevo : Balkans: As deadline passes, NATO officials say combatants are apparently in compliance with first test of peace accord. The withdrawal from selected sites is seen as a victory for the peacekeeping mission.

Bosnia’s enemy armies withdrew from selected front-line positions around this capital Wednesday in the first concrete test of a U.S.-brokered peace accord that formally ended 3 1/2 years of war.

As a midnight deadline established in the peace treaty approached and passed, NATO officials said Bosnian government and Bosnian Serb troops had apparently complied by evacuating trenches, bunkers and military emplacements in and near Sarajevo.

Wednesday’s pullback is an initial victory for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as it tries to prove that it can enforce the peace agreement. The withdrawal had also been seen as a test of whether the Bosnian combatants will stick by their commitments.

In many cases, the warring forces had been withdrawing gradually for days from an estimated 40 sites selected and agreed to by all involved, NATO officials said. Future deadlines require the two sides to mark or destroy their mines, disband paramilitary groups and move armies behind 1 1/4-mile zones of separation.

Up on Mt. Trebevic, one of the principal Bosnian Serb front-line fortifications overlooking Sarajevo, it appeared that most troops had pulled out several days ago, leaving behind a handful of morose and confused soldiers watching over empty, snow-covered trenches.

“In four years they couldn’t take this from us, and now we have to leave just like that,” said a 27-year-old Serbian soldier named Vojislav. “I haven’t heard anything from our commanders for three days, but when the time comes, we will leave.”

Trenches lined with wooden logs were dug in along the mountain’s pine-studded ridge. Ammunition boxes were scattered about.

Sekul Skocojic, another Serbian soldier who has spent the last 3 1/2 years in the bunkers, sat in a cramped wooden hut with his cat and his rifle. A dog encrusted with the falling hail waited outside. Inside, a little bit of electricity powered a single light bulb and a radio blaring Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.”

“The way things are being divided up, nothing will be left for the Serbs,” complained Skocojic, who has a wife in the nearby Serb-held Sarajevo district of Grbavica.

The soldiers said they will be forced into life as refugees because they cannot accept the authority of the Muslim-Croat government that, under the peace treaty, will soon be given control of the Serb-held areas around Sarajevo, such as Grbavica.

“My sons were born and raised in Sarajevo. Ask yourselves what kind of future they have. Where can they go and what can they do?” asked Skocojic’s companion, a 44-year-old soldier who is a native of Sarajevo and who did not want his name published.

“People who lose wars have no choice, and we lost the war.”

The peace plan gave the Bosnian combatants seven days from the time of NATO takeover to remove troops and materiel from designated positions along now-quiet confrontation lines that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

French NATO troops are charged with patrolling and monitoring the emptied battle lines.

One vacated position was a patch of deserted apartment buildings on the edge of the Sarajevo airport near the battered area known as Dobrinja. A two-lane road had marked the front line--Serbs on one side, Bosnian government troops on the other, the two foes barely 30 yards apart.

A French patrol--five men and a dog named Eliot--moved through the area Wednesday on the lookout for soldiers who may try to sneak back. The French also removed mines and detonated unexploded ordnance found on the site.

French Maj. Rodolphe D’Almont, who supervised the patrol, said the soldiers who were dug in at this spot left three days ago.

“Everything leads us to believe that the peace is starting to settle in,” D’Almont told reporters who covered the patrol’s activities on a pool basis.

The French will monitor the cleared zones periodically--at first moving through four times a day.

The French patrol continued to another Dobrinja bunker, one that was rapidly becoming a mishmash of red-clay mud in Wednesday’s steady snow. It led to an abandoned school where the Bosnian government had set up a firing position.

The school was completely sandbagged, with slits cut into the bags to permit shooting. The gun emplacements were behind a second wall, making it harder for the gunner to be hit by return fire--a military technique that even the French had to admire.

In other developments:

* The Bosnian government protested U.S. Adm. Leighton W. Smith’s offer to the Bosnian Serbs to consider their request for a postponement of the reunification of Sarajevo.

Smith, the commander of the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia-Herzegovina, met with Bosnian Serb leaders Tuesday who demanded that he delay implementing the peace accord’s requirement that the Serb-held suburbs around Sarajevo be restored to government control in 90 days.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic wrote to Smith seeking an explanation, and the government’s minister for relations with the United Nations and NATO, Hasan Muratovic, said the government was “deeply disappointed” with Smith’s response to the Serbs.

“There is no single accord on Sarajevo, and isolating this city from the overall accord is wrong,” Muratovic told the state news agency, ONASA.

Serbs living in the areas scheduled to revert to government control have said they are terrified of being ruled by their wartime enemy, but the government maintains that the actions by the Bosnian Serb leadership are a delaying tactic aimed at undermining the entire peace process.

* At a bombed-out restaurant deep in the heart of the hotly contested Posavina Corridor, Maj. Gen. William F. Nash sat down for coffee with leaders of the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian government forces.

The one-hour meeting brought the four leaders together for the first time to discuss how the 20,000 U.S. troops taking part in the peacekeeping mission will be deployed, although the warring factions began meeting routinely with NATO officials last week.

Sitting with Nash at a square table was Gen. Novica Simic of the Bosnian Serb army, Gen. Djuro Matuzovic of the Bosnian Croat army and Col. Efendic Muharem of the Bosnian army. Muharem was apparently a last-minute substitute for a higher-ranking Bosnian army officer. U.S. military officials said it was unclear whether the switch was intended as a snub.

* About 60 French Foreign Legionnaires had to be rescued by NATO helicopters when their camp was swept away by flash floods in the southern Bosnian town of Mostar. The flooding destroyed bridges, dams and the legionnaires’ tents. No one was reported injured.

* At the headquarters for the NATO peacekeeping force in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, military officials reported that despite weather and logistics problems, more than half of the 60,000-strong force has arrived in the region.

The latest figures showed that 34,591 members of the force are now in the Balkans, including 28,000 in Bosnia itself.

Times staff writers Nora Zamichow in Zupanja, Croatia, and Tyler Marshall in Zagreb contributed to this report.