Bosnia Rivals Battle for Sarajevo Districts

Bosnia’s rival groups stepped up their fight for key districts of Sarajevo on Saturday, just hours after U.N. peacekeepers managed to get their military commanders to sit down together for talks.

Machine-gun and mortar fire rattled through the city’s western suburbs overnight as Serbian forces appeared to be trying to link up with units in the north of the city.

Sarajevo radio said Serbs bombarded the suburb of Dobrinja at dawn Saturday. But fighting appeared to have slackened again by midmorning.

Meanwhile, the Belgrade-based Tanjug news agency reported that Bosnian Serb forces had reached the key northern town of Gradacac after several days of fierce fighting and were battling remaining Muslim forces in the town.

U.N. officials hailed Friday’s five-hour meeting in Sarajevo--the first face-to-face encounter between Muslim, Serbian and Croatian commanders--as a breakthrough in the search for peace in the former Yugoslav federation.

“For the first time we have spoken together not through weapons but around the table--it’s positive,” said the U.N. peace force commander, Gen. Philippe Morillon.

But there were few tangible signs of any end to the bitter fighting that has ravaged Bosnia for more than six months, or to the misery of thousands of people trapped or held prisoner by both sides.

In New York, the United Nations said it would send 7,000 more troops to Bosnia by mid-November and appointed a five-man panel to investigate war crimes in Yugoslavia.

But international efforts to secure the release of prisoners suffered a double blow Friday.

A release of the first 5,000, brokered by the Red Cross, had to be postponed because not enough West European countries had offered temporary asylum. Then Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, announced that he would no longer release Croatian and Muslim prisoners because the gesture was not being reciprocated.