The Balkan Crisis: Bosnia Serbs loath to be 'uncleansed': The town refuses to be run by Muslims, writes Robert Block in Zvornik

PEOPLE took advantage of the glorious spring day yesterday to walk down from the centre of Zvornik into the suburbs straddling the steep hills.

Some walked to the bank of the Drina river to catch the sunshine or to try their luck with a fishing rod. Others strolled across an old iron brigde into Serbia to drink coffee or play video games at roadside cafes.

Only the racket kicked up by an armoured personnel carrier crossing into Bosnia from Serbia shattered the illusion of tranquility and underscored the problem of Zvornik. The town of about 40,000 people, just a stone's throw from Serbia, was largely 'ethnically cleansed' last year. Although some Muslims are said to remain, it is now a staunchly Serbian town. That is the problem.

Under the peace plan signed on Sunday by parties to the war in Bosnia, Zvornik will be in a semi-autonomous Muslim administered province. The prospect has little support among the members of the Bosnian Serb parliament who must ratify the plan or face international condemnation. It had even less support among Zvornik's residents yesterday.

'People are never going to accept it. They would rather die,' said Diana, a 19-year-old student. Her boyfriend, Darko, agreed. 'Muslims and Serbs can no longer live together here after what has happened in this area,' he said.

Serbian hit squads went through this part of south-eastern Bosnia at lightning speed a year ago, killing and driving off thousands of Muslims. The Muslims took to the surrounding hills and from bases there launched some of the fiercest revenge attacks of the war. A 20- mile trail of devastation from just outside Zvornik, through Vlasenica to Bratunac, is testimony to the bloodshed. Both Serbian and Muslim villages have been razed.

According to Vlado, a 35-year- old Bosnian soldier who was visiting Zvornik yesterday, 2,500 Serbs from the area have been killed in fighting with the Muslims. 'Not even (Radovan) Karadzic (the Bosnian Serb leader) can ignore these victims,' he said.

That is why when Mr Karadzic stands before the angry gaze of his parliament in Pale tomorrow to explain the latest twists in the Vance-Owen plan, his most arduous task will be convincing his people that by backing the plan they will not be abandoning Serbs in places like Zvornik to an uncertain future.

To this end Mr Karadzic claims to have won concessions from the international community, including an equal veto in a tripartite presidency with the Muslims and Croats. However, his main selling point will be that the boundaries of the 10 ethnic provinces created by the Vance-Owen plan are only provisional. There will be, he insists, scope for swapping territories.

'We will all have to sit down and talk face to face and change some territories,' Mr Karadzic said late on Sunday after he returned to Yugoslavia from an international summit meeting on Bosnia in Greece. 'The big concern was what to do with Serbs who are in those provinces that are not Serbian. Some of them will be annexed to Serbian provinces . . . some will have to be protected and we will protect them,' he said.

According to Mr Karadzic, Serbian villages in Muslim or Croatian provinces will be off- limits to other ethnic forces and will be protected by United Nations troops and the villages' police forces. 'We have three provinces right now and maybe one more if we negotiate,' he said, adding: 'I think we can realise our objectives after the war, during the peacetime.'

The consequences of refusing to accept the Vance-Owen plan are already too obvious. A few miles down the road from Zvornik on the Serbian side of the bridge, partly concealed under camouflage netting, a Yugoslav anti-aircraft gun sits unmanned pointing towards the airspace over Bosnia, ready for any attacks by Western military aircraft.

Many Bosnian leaders have been denouncing the Vance- Owen plan, and are vowing that they will never ratify it. On the other hand, residents of Zvornik seem much less hardened in their opinions. None of them blamed Mr Karadzic and said they felt that in Athens he had been forced into putting his signature to the plan.