Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 6, 1993 TAG: 9305060298
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The vote was certain to prompt international condemnation and heighten prospects of foreign military intervention to end Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II. The conflict has left at least 134,000 dead or missing.
Of the 65 deputies present, 51 voted to hold a referendum, two were against the plan and 12 abstained.
Despite stern warnings of military reprisals, the group earlier had drafted a list of conditions for its acceptance of the plan.
The conditions were seen as being unacceptable to the international community, whose mediators spent months working on the plan and getting the other two parties to the Bosnian civil war - the Muslims and Croats - to accept it.
A Clinton administration official in Washington said the Serbs' conditions were impossible for the United States to accept. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
The conditions included demands for Serb-held areas to be linked; for changes in the proposal to divide Bosnia into 10 semiautonomous provinces; and for lifting U.N. sanctions that were imposed against Yugoslavia for its support of the Bosnian Serbs.
Radovan Karadzic, chieftain of the rebel Serbs, had opened a two-day meeting of the assembly with an appeal to its members to ratify the plan, which he signed at a special conference in Greece on Sunday under international pressure.
"Either we accept this plan, or we can expect fierce attacks by NATO forces," he said.
Karadzic's appeal was reinforced by Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic was an early instigator of the Bosnian Serb rebellion and an overt supporter of it until trade and other sanctions imposed by the United Nations began to squeeze the Yugoslav federation, now consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro.
But a hard-line mood persisted among the deputies, who twice have flatly rejected the plan, the second time just 10 days ago.
Miroslav Toholj, information minister in the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb government, said that the Americans "are only bluffing" and will never intervene in the Bosnian civil war, as President Clinton has prepared measures to do.
by CNB