PALE -- Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic indicated Wednesday he was ready to restart Bosnia peace talks with the major powers' contact group.


Karadzic said "new interpretations" of an international peace plan, recently given by Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic, were "a good point of departure for more talks with the contact group."


Karadzic was referring to a meeting Monday in Belgrade with deputies from the Bosnian Serb parliament at which Milosevic gave his interpretation of the contact group plan after a meeting last Friday in Brussels.


The Bosnian Serb "parliament" rejected the plan out of hand in the summer, but a revised version envisages a possible Serb confederation and land swaps with the other side.


Despite the positive news from Pale, French Foreign Minister Alain Jupp? signaled his frustration with progress toward peace in Bosnia, saying in Paris that France had asked the United Nations and NATO to make detailed plans to withdraw peacekeepers from Bosnia.


"The decision which we are being forced into will mean war, more unhappiness and more suffering," Jupp? told the National Assembly, adding that he feared the Balkans would be "set ablaze" in the near future.


In Brussels, NATO decided to ask member states how many troops they might be willing to contribute to any such pullout, NATO sources said.


Western powers have signalled, in increasingly open fashion, their desire to withdraw contingents deployed in the former Yugoslavia which have proved powerless to stop the fighting or enforce UN-declared safe areas.


Fanning a row with Washington over who is to blame for what he called the dead end in Bosnia, Jupp? denounced governments "which teach us lessons daily and which have not lifted a little finger to put even one man on the ground."