ANKARA (AP) – Turkey is seeking help from NATO to help clear land mines from the country’s border with Syria. The announcement yesterday by the Defense Ministry ends a dispute over who would do the job. The military and opposition parties had strongly opposed a government-drafted law that allowed private foreign companies to clear the mines in return for the right to farm the fertile land for up to 44 years. The Defense Ministry says talks have begun with the NATO Maintenance and Supply Agency, which is NATO’s principal logistics support management agency. Turkey, a NATO member and US ally, planted more than half a million mines along the 500-kilometer (310-mile) Syrian border in the 1950s to secure the frontier.

THE HAGUE (AP) – Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has filed a pretrial brief at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal saying he is not guilty of all 11 charges filed against him. “If the law is applied fairly and the truth about the events in Bosnia is allowed to come out, he is confident that the trial chamber will find him not guilty,” Karadzic and his team of legal advisers said in the brief released yesterday by the UN court. At previous hearings Karadzic has refused to enter pleas to the charges which include genocide, extermination and persecution. The court entered not guilty pleas on his behalf.

ANKARA (AP) – Turkey’s economy shrank by a painful 13.8 percent in the first quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago as foreign trade contracted sharply amid the global recession, the Turkish Statistics Institute announced yesterday. The government did not provide an explanation but the hardest hit was trade with statistics showing a 25.4 percent contraction in the first quarter, with both exports and orders down. Turkey has been unable to reach an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for several months for a new loan deal to alleviate the impact of the global financial crisis on its government finances. New talks with the IMF began in January but differences over the conditions attached to the loan limited any progress. Turkey is reportedly eyeing a three-year loan deal of around $40 billion.

Croatian and Serbian officials pledged yesterday to do their utmost to resolve the fate of the hundreds of people still reported missing from the 1990s war. “We all want the issue, the most painful issue of all the conflicts in the region, to be solved as soon as possible,” Veljko Odalovic, the head of Serbia’s missing persons commission, told journalists in Zagreb. His Croatian counterpart Ivan Grujic issued a similar commitment. “We agreed that we will intensify efforts on both sides to resolve issues that remain open,” Grujic said. Zagreb is notably seeking information about possible mass graves as well as secondary burial sites where the victims’ remains were moved to cover up the crime, he said. Grujic said 2,144 people are still reported as missing from Croatia’s 1991-95 independence war, around half of them Croats and some 800 mostly ethnic Serbs. The two sides also agreed to carry out exhumations on three locations in Serbia where executed Croatian detainees were thought to be buried. (AFP)

A Bosnian court yesterday jailed a former Serb military policeman for seven-and-a-half years over the murder and torture of non-Serb civilians during the 1992-95 war. Rade Veselinovic had earlier pleaded guilty to killing one civilian in the area of the Sarajevo suburb of Hadzic in June 1992, the Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina said in a statement. The 65-year-old was also convicted of “torture, other inhumane acts of a similar nature... as well as enforced disappearance” of the non-Serb population around Hadzic, it said. Veselinovic took part in the unlawful arrest of the non-Serb civilians in Hadzic and neighboring settlements before taking them to a detention facility where they were beaten and abused, the court added. (AFP)

The Romanian central bank BNR said yesterday it would cut its interest rates by half a percentage point to 9.0 percent effective July 1. The rate cut – the third this year – had been widely anticipated by analysts who argued that a move was necessary following a 4.6 percent contraction in the economy in the first quarter of 2009. (AFP)