Bosnian Serb Leader Rejects Final Plan : Balkans: Karadzic’s decision will bring harsher sanctions, spur move for Western intervention.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on Saturday rejected the last offered compromise on a peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina, a move that will bring harsher U.N. sanctions on his patrons in Serbia and probably accelerate the drive for Western military intervention in the Balkan war.

“If we accept this, we are dead, finished,” a visibly shaken Karadzic told reporters after talks here with European Community mediator Lord Owen.

Karadzic denounced the negotiator’s final offer that would have averted new sanctions that come into effect Monday, saying the world failed to understand that Serbs want to live apart from other peoples.

“We have to separate the three antagonized communities,” he said of Bosnia’s Muslims, Serbs and Croats. “Why are you pushing us together like dogs and cats in the same boxes? It’s impossible to live together.”

Karadzic’s refusal to endorse the ethnic division of Bosnia already approved by the war-torn republic’s Muslims and Croats dealt what appears to be a final blow to the plan crafted by Owen and fellow mediator Cyrus R. Vance of the United Nations. A formal vote by the rogue Bosnian Serb parliament is expected today.

Owen angrily brushed past reporters after the meeting with Karadzic, apparently aware that his eight-month quest for a peaceful settlement was ending in failure.

Owen had been shuttling among the troubled Balkan capitals since Wednesday in an 11th-hour bid to make the settlement plan palatable to the rebel Serbs, who have already conquered 70% of Bosnia and “ethnically cleansed” that territory of non-Serbs.

The Vance-Owen plan would compel the Serbs to withdraw from about half of the land they have taken, including a vital supply route that parallels Bosnia’s northern border along the Sava River.

The Serbs had deemed the Vance-Owen plan, which would divide Bosnia into 10 ethnic provinces linked by a weak central government in Sarajevo, unacceptable because they want geographically contiguous territory they can eventually join to Serbia and to Serb-occupied regions of Croatia.

Karadzic had loudly protested being deprived of the northern corridor, contending that Serbs in northwestern Bosnia could be cut off from food and fuel deliveries.

In a late-night meeting with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on Friday, Owen sought to get the Balkan strongman’s support for a compromise addressing the Bosnian Serbs’ stated supply concerns. He offered a U.N.-supervised route through the Croatian-controlled territory that would ensure safe passage of goods and people while prohibiting military transports.

“The analogy is the Berlin corridor,” said one senior source in the Vance-Owen peace talks, referring to the lifeline through which the isolated city of West Berlin was supplied before reunification.

Senior diplomats traveling with Owen described the proposal as a “fig leaf” that could cover a Serb retreat from previous insistence that no plan without a supply line would win acceptance.

But they acknowledged that the Bosnian Serbs’ actual aim was a geographic linking of the three provinces destined for Serbian rule and unimpeded access of Belgrade arms and soldiers to far-flung Serb territories in the west.

In addition to the new sanctions likely to choke off fuel and other vital supplies to Serbia, the failure of the Vance-Owen peace talks has given weight to the view that only force will break the Serbs’ drive for territory.

European Community foreign ministers were meeting in Denmark this weekend to weigh military action to bring the year-old Bosnian war to an end.