PRESIDENT OF BOSNIA REJECTS CEASE-FIRE, TREATY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 1, 1993                   TAG: 9302010006
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A/6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: ZAGREB, CROATIA                                LENGTH: Medium
PRESIDENT OF BOSNIA REJECTS CEASE-FIRE, TREATY
The president of Bosnia-Herzegovina vowed Sunday that he would never agree to a division of his country that awards "the biggest slaughterhouses of ethnic cleansing" to the Serbian gunmen who carried out the deadly campaign for an ethnically pure state.
But President Alija Izetbegovic said his refusal to sign a separate cease-fire agreement for Bosnia had to do only with reservations about whether U.N. forces could effectively collect the heavy weapons besieging his republic and ensure they were kept out of the reach of the militant Serbs.
Izetbegovic, en route to his embattled capital of Sarajevo, met with reporters here to explain why he had refused to endorse the two documents drawn up by Western mediators who are trying to impose peace by carving up Bosnia into 10 autonomous provinces.
Both Izetbegovic and the Bosnian Serb chieftain, Radovan Karadzic, objected to the plan as presented by Cyrus Vance of the United Nations and Lord Owen of the European Community, prompting the mediators to declare their 5-month-old peace talks in Geneva hopelessly deadlocked.
Vance and Owen planned to lobby the U.N. Security Council today to impose their three-stage peace settlement by threatening the resistant factions with unspecified sanctions. They encouraged leaders of Bosnia's warring parties to go to New York to present their own views.
While in this Croatian capital, Izetbegovic met with the commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces in the former Yugoslav federation to discuss specific arrangements for silencing the big guns that have made a shambles of Sarajevo and other major Bosnian cities.
The Bosnian president, a Slavic Muslim, said the proposed provisions for U.N. monitoring of tanks and heavy artillery were too vague and open to the kind of misinterpretation that has allowed the weaponry, already under U.N. "surveillance," to continue firing on Bosnian civilians.
While Bosnian government endorsement of the cease-fire plan appeared to be within reach, Izetbegovic stood firmly by his earlier denunciation of the Vance-Owen map detailing their plan for the reconfiguration of Bosnia.
He said he would appeal to the Security Council for a redistricting of his country on a more logical basis, giving greater consideration of transportation, communications and other social links than to the ethnic distribution that has resulted from 10 months of siege and displacement.
The Geneva mediators have denied their proposed map aims at ethnic partitioning, but the bizarre configuration of several provinces testifies to the contrary.
Izetbegovic appeared confident of a more sympathetic hearing in New York than he felt the government side got in Geneva, saying that Vance and Owen "wanted more to save their conference than to save Bosnia-Herzegovina."
Some Security Council members are thought to be skeptical of the mediators' peace proposal because it would dismantle the democratically elected leadership of a state recognized by the United Nations and possibly be seen as a precedent for legitimizing the use of force in the revision of borders in the future.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB