ANKARA (AP) - Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that any Turkish peacekeepers sent to Iraq will not end up in a quagmire, a statement apparently aimed at a public that is increasing wary of sending troops to Iraq. The statement, in a late Monday interview with private Kanal D television, came as Turkey and the United States prepared to discuss conditions of a possible Turkish deployment in Iraq. “Neither we nor our military would ever send our army into a quagmire. Our people should trust us on that,” Erdogan said. “Our hope is that our soldiers will go there for the happiness of the Iraqi people,” he said.

ZAGREB (AP) - Ethnic discrimination of Serbs remains the main factor impeding the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees to their prewar homes, a leading international human rights watchdog said yesterday. In a 61-page report, “Broken Promises: Impediments to Refugee Return to Croatia,” the New York-based Human Rights Watch agency describes the plight of displaced Serbs, insisting that progress on repatriation be made a condition of Croatia’s integration into mainstream Europe. “The obstacles, both legal and practical and very political in nature... can be traced back to local but also to national government authorities,” Lotte Leicht, the agency’s regional director based in Brussels, said.

Albanian lawmakers have condemned a recent Serbian Parliament resolution declaring Kosovo province an integral part of Serbia, spokesman Skender Duka said yesterday. In its first session after the summer break, Parliament in Tirana issued a statement late Monday denouncing the Serbian move as a “dangerous return to failed nationalistic policies” threatening the whole Balkan region. “Such a baseless statement is not in line with (United Nations) Resolution 1244, the (view of the) international community and UNMIK in Kosovo,” the document said, referring to the UN Mission in Kosovo. (AP)

Turkey’s Kurdish rebels said yesterday they were not planning an immediate onslaught against Ankara after ending their four-year unilateral ceasefire with the government. “The coming three months will be for us a process of struggle to achieve a bilateral ceasefire. We do not see this as a process of a war,” the Internet edition of pro-Kurdish daily Ozgur Politika quoted senior PKK commander Mustafa Karasu as saying. The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), now renamed KADEK, called off its 1999 truce on Monday on the grounds that Ankara had failed to respond with reciprocal good will. (AFP)

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic yesterday demanded two years to prepare his defense against charges of war crimes during the bloody breakup of the Balkans in the 1990s. “The most modest amount of time that is necessary to prepare my defense is two years,” said Milosevic, who has been on trial at the UN tribunal here since February 2002. But his request was immediately rejected by the president of the UN court, Richard May, who insisted there was “no question” of suspending the trial for two years. (AFP)