Cease-Fire Ignored Around Bihac

Bosnia’s president warned the United Nations Friday that efforts to shore up a four-month truce would fail unless Serbs and their allies stopped attacking government forces in northwest Bosnia.

Bosnian Serbs signed the cease-fire that went into effect last Sunday, but their allies in the northwest - Croatian Serbs and renegade Muslims - did not. They have been fighting government forces in the so-called Bihac pocket since November.

U.N. spokesman Maj. Herve Gourmelon reported about 70 mortar and artillery rounds near Velika Kladusa in far northwest Bosnia early Friday.

The situation in northwest Bosnia “calls into question the cease-fire we all have made such an effort to achieve,” President Alija Izetbegovic wrote to the U.N. chief official for former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi.