SARAJEVO, Oct 17 (Reuter) - Serb bulldozers have begun to level the site around an historic mosque destroyed in a 1993 campaign to drive Moslems out of the Bosnian town of Banja Luka, Western officials said on Thursday.

Colum Murphy, spokesman for Sweden's Carl Bildt, the international community's representative for Bosnia, called the demolition of remaining buildings at the site where the Ferhadija Mosque had stood since 1583, ``sinister, abhorrent and outrageous.''

``You know that during the war the Ferhadija Mosque was destroyed in an act of famous barbarism,'' Murphy told reporters.

``Last night and this morning the area has been sealed off and bulldozers have appeared and begun leveling other parts of that site, on which stand buildings belonging to the Islamic community,'' Murphy told a news conference.

Bildt's deputy, Michael Steiner of Germany, was traveling to Banja Luka for talks with Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic in an attempt to halt the bulldozers, Murphy said.

The Ferhadija Mosque was built in 1583 during the Ottoman empire and was regarded as one of the finest outside the Arab world. Its destruction along with the nearby 16th century Arnaudija Mosque in May 1993 caused a storm of protest.

Ferhadija had been a UNESCO protected monument, but the Orthodox Serbs, who used tones of explosives to flatten it, threw its ancient stones onto a garbage dump and boasted that the site would make an excellent parking lot.

The destruction of hundreds of mosques in Bosnia was a part of the Serbs' wartime campaign of ``ethnic cleansing'' using terror to force people to flee and leave behind ethnically pure areas.

Murphy said the decision to further level the site could have been meant as a ``deliberate provocation'' by the Serbs ahead of Saturday's session of the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb) assembly in Banja Luka.

``It is just possible, although we don't want to speculate, that the idea is to provoke people into not wanting to attend that assembly, and that would not be a good thing,'' Murphy said.

Major Scott Boudreau, a spokesman for the 58,000-strong NATO-led force in Bosnia, said peace keeping troops were ready to intervene if asked by Bildt's office.

Boudreau said the peace keepers had received no specific requests to provide extra security for non-Serb deputies wishing to attend the assembly.

Members of Bildt's staff plan to go along with the non- Serb deputies, officials said.

Of the 83-member Republika Srpska assembly chosen in general elections on September 14, there are 18 members from the Moslem-Croat federation in Bosnia.

A spokesman for the ruling SDA party in Sarajevo said members had planned to go to Banja Luka, but he had not heard about the latest incident and could not yet say whether it would affect their decision.