Bosnian

PARIS -- Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic said yesterda ,, that he would not take part in peace talks scheduled to resume in Geneva today to protest the assassination of a senior member of his government by a Serbian soldier in Sarajevo on Friday.But Mr. Izetbegovic also made it clear that the Muslim-led Bosnian government was not withdrawing from the peace talks, which are being co-sponsored by the United Nations and the European Community, and he left open the possibility that he might still travel to Geneva today.

The report from the State Department was brief: Thomas M. Jennings Jr., a federal worker from Burtonsville on a temporary assignment with NATO peacekeepers, had died in a car crash in Southern Bosnia. Fifteen years later, it turns out that was only part of the story. Unknown to neighbors and friends, Jennings was working for the CIA, the agency acknowledged last week. A veteran covert officer — he told acquaintances he worked for the State Department — he volunteered to go to Sarajevo after the Bosnian war as a U.S.-led force worked to maintain peace.

WASHINGTON -- In a breakthrough toward ending Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II, the former Yugoslavia's three warring sides agreed yesterday on a division of Bosnia that grants Bosnia's Serbs a largely self-governing state of their own.The agreement announced in Geneva required all sides to give up some loudly professed principles. Muslims, Croats and Serbs agreed to split Bosnia along ethnic lines, with a Muslim-Croat federation getting 51 percent, and a Serbian republic getting 49 percent, as well as its own name.

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro -- Rumors swirled late yesterday that Gen. Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb commander accused of orchestrating Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II, had been captured and was being transferred to an international court in the Netherlands to be tried on war crimes charges. Serbian officials quickly denied the reports, and a spokesman for the court in The Hague said the panel had no information that an arrest had been made. People close to the Serbian government and Western sources indicated that intense negotiations are under way between the government and Mladic to persuade him to surrender.

The children of war have gathered in a small Carroll County town to talk about peace.About 70 Bosnian students who are attending American high schools and colleges arrived at the Brethren Service Center in New Windsor on Wednesday for three days of conferences and a little holiday merriment.Lunch hour in Ziegler Hall yesterday was festive, filled with young people engaged in lively conversations.A student played the piano with music so recognizable that many chimed in with lyrics. They posed for pictures and coaxed smiles and more songs from one another.

VOGOSCA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Convinced that Serbs who remain in Sarajevo's suburbs are determined to flee rather than submit to the Muslim-dominated government, NATO yesterday agreed to allow the Bosnian Serb army to send trucks to transport them to Serb-controlled areas.Relief agencies, including the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, had refused to help Serbs leave, saying doing so would be tacit support for a form of "ethnic cleansing." But NATO's commander in Bosnia, Adm. Leighton Smith, said after touring Vogosca and other suburbs that because Serbs are leaving anyway, their flight should be made as painless as possible.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Balkan ethnic loyalties die hard, even when uprooted and moved across a continent.Consider the case of Fedor Keredzin, an ethnic Serb born and raised in Sweden and now a 2nd lieutenant in the Swedish army. On a recent day Lieutenant Keredzin was on duty for NATO peacekeeping forces at a checkpoint manned by Swedish troops.A few hundred yards in one direction, Muslim soldiers of the Bosnian government huddled in cold, muddy bunkers. A few hundred yards in the opposite direction, a handful of Bosnian Serb soldiers patrolled their side of the line in a destroyed village of a dozen or so homes, with their front-yard trenches and mines scattered across thistled lawns.

British armored vehicles in central BOSNIA near VITEZ foun the Muslim village BANDOL razed by Bosnian Croat forces, reporters with the convoy say. In the nearby Croatian village of Maline, they say, Muslim troops sprayed houses with Islamic slogans and crescent symbols, but left the buildings intact.International mediators Lord David Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg met with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic in GENEVA in renewed diplomatic efforts to end the war, and Bosnian Radio says the Bosnian presidency ordered a Muslim-Croat cease-fire.

Bosnian government troops have converged north of Sarajevo, triggering fears of a major battle between the government and rebel Bosnian Serbs for control of the Bosnian capital and the surrounding hills.Leaders of Bosnia's Muslim-led government say they are ready to try to force an end to the 3-year-old siege of the city, which is encircled by Serbian forces equipped with heavy artillery despite efforts by U.N. peacekeepers to confiscate heavy weapons from both sides.Article, 3A

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Draped in green cloth, 107 coffins were passed by outstretched arms yesterday over the heads of families mourning an 8-year-old massacre. The caskets were lowered, one by one, to final burial. Fathers with their sons. Brothers. Cousins. All of them male Muslims between ages 16 and 75. In a solemn ceremony, thousands of Bosnians and their guest of honor, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, dedicated the first official memorial to the more than 7,000 victims of the single bloodiest atrocity in Europe since World War II - a "genocidal madness," as Clinton put it. "History has assigned us a role as witness to human hatred," said Advija Ibrahimovic, who was 10 when her father was taken from her and led to his death, in opening the ceremony.

PARIS - Prosecutors at the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic have produced what may prove to be crucial evidence in support of their case that the former Yugoslav president is guilty of genocide in Bosnia. A document, the first of its kind to be presented in the United Nations war crimes tribunal, is an order from the Bosnian Serb interior minister, Tomislav Kovac, instructing the special police to move into Srebrenica just days before forces under Bosnian Serb command began the execution of more than 7,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, the first Balkan political leader to plead guilty to war crimes charges, faced justice, history and her country's collective denial in yesterday's opening of her extraordinary three-day sentencing hearing. An academic and politician who incited ethnic hatred, consorted with warlords and earned the nickname the Iron Lady of the Balkans, Plavsic was a key public figure during the violent unraveling of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The winner of this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar, No Man's Land wrings more black comedy and terror out of the close quarters of a trench than Panic Room does out of a panic room. Bosnian writer-director Danis Tanovic's tight narrative strands one Serbian and two Bosnians in the same ditch between their warring armies' lines - and plants one of the Bosnians on top of a "bouncing mine" that will detonate as soon as he rolls off it. This movie goes beyond "war is hell": Tanovic dispenses with that maxim right away, when he shows the massacre of a Bosnian relief squad en route to the front.

LONDON - NATO gave notice yesterday to the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the most wanted man in the Balkans: His life on the run is about to become ever more perilous. For the first time yesterday, NATO-led peacekeepers conducted an intensive and public operation directed at rooting out Karadzic, who has lived for years apparently just out of sight of international forces. The troops set off explosives, lifted carpets and even searched behind a church altar, but failed to find him. Wearing black masks and armed with assault rifles, they swept through a hamlet near Celebici in a remote corner of eastern Bosnia, seizing three caches of weapons.

MCLEAN, Va. - President Bush's reaffirmation two weeks ago in Kosovo that American forces will remain in the Balkans is bad news for those long bent on obstructing the Dayton peace process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Bush administration now needs to impart a fresh sense of determination to achieve the goal of a just peace among Bosnia's Muslims, Croats and Serbs, including those who wish only to be known as Bosnians. Policies, however, need success stories. The conflicted Bosnian city of Brcko is one such story.

PARIS -- Institutions are not ordinarily given to examinations of conscience. Nor do they often make apologies to those they have failed. Thus, release by the United Nations of results of an internal investigation of its July 1995 conduct at Srebrenica, in Bosnia, was remarkable.It was the more so because Kofi Annan, the current U.N. secretary general, was head of the Bosnian peacekeeping operation at the time of the Bosnian war, and in the direct chain of command that so tragically failed Srebrenica.

SARAJEVO -- In a city where bad memories are no further away than the gravestones in the parks and red "Sarajevo Roses" mark where sniper bullets dropped people to the sidewalks, residents remember the 1984 Winter Olympics as a wondrous period of festivity and peace.They remember it as a time when the world's spotlight trained on Yugoslavia for reasons that had nothing to do with ethnic hatred or war.They want to bring back the games.Unlikely as that might seem, former Yugoslav President Bogic Bogicevic heads a planning committee writing a proposal to the International Olympic Committee to bring the winter 2010 games to this central Bosnian city of 400,000.