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

DATE: SATURDAY, July 31, 1993                   TAG: 9307310144
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE: GENEVA                                LENGTH: Medium

BOSNIA AGREES TO BE CUT APART SERBS SAY THEY'LL GIVE UP SOME LAND

Bowing to intense military pressure that has devastated his country and decimated the Muslim population, President Alija Izetbegovic gave his oral agreement to a framework drafted by international mediators David Owen of Britain and Thorvald Stoltenberg of Norway. Although he later proclaimed the plan a great success, the agreement replaces his government with a weak three-man collective presidency and very likely will lead to the demise of the current Bosnia state.

Muslim leaders said the decision to accept the plan with some modifications was a desperate attempt to preserve some territory and save as much of the Bosnian population as possible from annihilation. Military leaders agreed Friday in Sarajevo to yet another truce, but it was uncertain whether it would hold any longer than the previous two dozen or so attempts.

Unlike an earlier plan negotiated by Owen and former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, the new draft contained no safeguards, and no outside power has offered to guarantee its terms. The parties must still agree to a map, and Izetbegovic said any accord reached in Geneva must be ratified by the Bosnian parliament.

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic said the Serbs, who now control 70 percent of the territory, plan to reduce this to 50 percent and will allow the Muslims to have 30 percent and the Croats 20 percent. Before the war and the Serb terror tactics known as "ethnic cleansing," Muslims constituted 44 percent of the population, Serbs 33 percent and Croats 17 percent.

Clear victor in the bloody drama was the president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic. He told Belgrade television Friday night that the war, in which as many as 200,000 Bosnians, mostly Muslims, died, "was worth it."

"Every citizen is well aware of the burden borne by Serbia in its assistance and solidarity with our people outside Serbia," he told Belgrade Television. "It turned out that all that we have had to go through in these past few years was worth it." Milosevic said he hoped the world community would now lift the economic sanctions it has imposed against Serbia.

Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, who has long favored a division of the ethnically mixed Bosnian republic between Serbia and Croatia, also expressed satisfaction with the outcome.

Tudjman said the agreement offered a basis "for the solution of all the remaining crises in the former Yugoslavia" including Croatia's own problem with its Serb minority. It was therefore, he said, also "conducive to the normalization of relations between Serbia and Croatia," which fought a seven-month war.