ANKARA (AFP) - A group of Iranian refugees demanding asylum in a western country sewed their lips during a sit-in protest outside a United Nations office in eastern Turkey, a UN spokesman said yesterday. “They have been holding similar protests since the beginning of this week. Some paste tape over their mouths, others harm themselves quite badly using needles,” Metin Corabatir, from the Ankara office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told AFP. About 150 people gathered yesterday outside the UNHCR office in the city of Van, demanding financial assistance and calling on the agency to arrange their transfer to a Western country. The protesters were part of a group of about 1,200 Iranians, who first fled to Iraq and then in 2000 to Turkey, claiming political oppression at home.

ZAGREB (AFP) - The two main rivals in Croatia’s forthcoming general elections pledged yesterday to make accession to the European Union the top priority for the next government. In their first public debate in the buildup to the November 23 polls, Prime Minister Ivica Racan of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and opposition leader Ivo Sanader, of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), put Europe at the center of their political platforms. “A vote for the Croatian Democratic Union is a vote for Croatia in the EU in 2007,” Sanader told national radio. “If we stay in power, Croatia will certainly join” the EU in 2007, Racan replied.

Romanian President Ion Iliescu, a staunch US ally in Iraq, was treated to lunch at the Pentagon this week — but the table was decorated with the Russian flag, his office and the US Embassy said yesterday. The gaffe during Iliescu’s lunch in Washington on Monday with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was widely reported yesterday in Romanian newspapers, along with photographs of the luncheon that clearly showed a Russian flag draped on the table. Romanian officials moved quickly to play down the incident. “I don’t believe that anyone can imagine that Mr Rumsfeld doesn’t know who he is meeting,” Iliescu spokeswoman Corina Cretu told reporters. (AP)

Doctors in southern Turkey have removed a 7-kilogram (15-pound) hernia lump from a Turk who lived with the condition for 20 years because he feared going under a surgeon’s knife, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. “We witnessed a case we have never spotted in medical literature,” said the surgeon who operated on 46-year-old Mursel Demir in the town of Iskenderun. Demir, who was in good health after the operation, said he had refused surgery ever since he was first diagnosed 20 years ago because he feared he might die and leave his children orphans. (AFP)