TROOPS WITHDRAW IN BOSNIA\Forces create buffer ahead of deadline.

Byline: Liam McDowall Associated Press 

Several thousand government, Serb and Croat troops withdrew from their front-line trenches and bunkers across central and northeastern Bosnia on Sunday, beating a deadline to create buffer zones between the forces.

The withdrawal came five days before the Friday deadline for the creation of 2-1/2-mile buffer zones along former front lines throughout Bosnia.

The deadline is part of the U.S.-brokered peace agreement signed last month, under which Bosnia is to be partitioned into two ethnically based entities and a 60,000-man NATO-led peacekeeping force is to be deployed.

"This is a tremendous beginning," Maj. Alistair Ross, a NATO spokesman, said at this front-line village, 120 miles northwest of Sarajevo. "It's too early to say the peace will hold, but what we're seeing today hasn't been achieved in almost four years of war."

The buffer zones - marked by orange paint on tree stumps and roads and by stretches of orange wire - are off-limits to all military personnel other than the peacekeepers.

Emerging from a clump of beech trees concealed in thick fog, a unit of front-line Bosnian Croat troops beamed at waiting reporters as they filed across the orange line guarded by British troops.

"I'm going home soon, but in the meantime I'm happy to be four kilometers (2-1/2 miles) away from those Serbs rather than just 300 meters (yards)," said Toni, a mud-caked young soldier who declined to give his full name.

By midday Sunday, wary British troops entered the zone, checking for stragglers, interlopers or booby traps.

Inside one newly deserted foxhole, crudely constructed of logs and plastic sheeting, they gently prodded the ground with their bayonets, checking for mines or trip wires. Tens of thousands of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines have already been marked out or removed from the zones.

Locating and deactivating mines is a critical task of the peacekeepers, and its urgency was underscored Sunday when two vehicles in the NATO force ran over mines.

In one incident, three soldiers from a Scandinavian battalion were injured, one seriously, when an anti-tank mine exploded under their armored personnel carrier near Maglaj. In the other, a U.S. armored vehicle hit a mine near Gradacac, but there were no injuries.

In a sign of subsiding tensions, Serbs on Sunday released two people who had been held since crossing into Serb sections of Sarajevo around Christmas.

The release of the two was not directly related to the exchange of around 900 people planned for today and Tuesday, mandated by the peace agreement that says all war prisoners must be freed by Jan. 19.

But the action was likely to boost the confidence of the hostile sides. Other prisoner exchanges have foundered at the last minute.