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

DATE: MONDAY, May 17, 1993                   TAG: 9305170056
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PALE, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA                                LENGTH: Medium

SERBS, CROATS OK PACT

Outgunned Muslim forces fought off Serb and Croat attacks on Sunday as Serbs voted on an international peace plan they seemed certain to reject. A Bosnian official said his nation's cause appeared hopeless.

With the plan apparently doomed, the powerful Serbs and Croats - who between them control most of Bosnia-Herzegovina - were poised to squeeze the weak Muslim-led government forces and carve up most of the state.

Bosnian Serb commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and his Bosnian Croat counterpart, Gen. Milivoje Petkovic, signed a truce pact Sunday as Croats stepped up attacks on Muslim forces in southwestern Bosnia. But the accord, scheduled to take effect Tuesday, is similar to others that have quickly collapsed.

"We don't have a chance," said Kemal Muftic, an aide to Bosnia's Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, in Sarajevo. "They have decided to go to the end. They feel how weak we are."

The two-day referendum on the U.N.-backed peace plan ended Sunday. Bosnia's Serbs appeared certain to rebuff the plan, since it would require them to give up much of the territory they gained in 13 months of civil war. Results are expected today.

The "plan is dead and the international community will have to think of some other plan if it wants peace in Bosnia," Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic told a Yugoslavian television network. His statement was not an announcement of election results, but a familiar boast about its anticipated defeat.

The plan, which Karadzic had signed under intense international pressure, would divide Bosnia into largely autonomous provinces among the three warring factions: Muslims, ethnic Serbs and ethnic Croats. Sarajevo, the capital, would be jointly governed.

Recognizing the threat of an even greater three-way conflict, European Community mediator Lord Owen appealed for thousands more peacekeepers to protect Muslims in U.N.-designated safe areas.

Bosnian Serb forces, ignoring a U.N.-brokered cease-fire, attacked sparse government forces for the fourth consecutive day around Brcko in northeastern Bosnia.

by CNB