PODGORICA (AP) – Montenegro and a European Commission team have finished negotiations on a pre-membership deal meant to prepare the country for eventual bloc membership, EU and Montenegrin officials said yesterday. With “technical negotiations finished,” the so-called Stabilization and Association Agreement could be signed within weeks, said Montenegro’s minister for European integration, Gordana Djurovic. The agreement, also known as SAA, is designed to prepare EU hopefuls for possible membership. The EU has encouraged newly independent Montenegro to work toward joining the bloc.

SARAJEVO (AFP) - Bosnian forensic experts said yesterday that they had recovered some 200 remains believed to be of Croats and Muslims killed at the beginning of the country’s 1992-1995 war in the northwestern town of Brcko.“Experts have exhumed in the village of Gorice, near Brcko, 87 complete and 113 incomplete skeletons,” said Murat Hurtic of Bosnia’s Missing Persons Commission. “We’ve discovered skulls with over three gunshot wounds. This shows the brutality of the murderers,” he said. Exhumation from the grave is to continue over the next few weeks.

Fugitive Bosnian-Serb war crimes suspects Radovan Karadzic and Stojan Zupljanin are hiding in Bosnia and Serbia, a Bosnian newspaper quoted chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte as saying. “They are in the RS (Bosnian-Serb Republic), in the border zone between the RS and Serbia,” Del Ponte said, according to yesterday’s edition of the Dnevni Avaz daily. The paper said she made the assertion to Bosnia’s tripartite presidency at a meeting on Thursday. (Reuters)

Bosnia’s military, composed of bitter wartime foes – Croats, Muslims and Serbs – held its first Armed Forces Day as a united entity yesterday. “This is just the beginning,” Defense Minister Nikola Radovanovic said at a special ceremony during which he vowed to make the military a model of “integration” and “stability.” Since the 1992-1995 war, Bosnia has been composed of two semi-autonomous entities, the Serbs’ Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation, each with its own government, parliament and police. (AFP)