ANKARA (Reuters) - A lawmaker quit Turkey’s ruling conservative party yesterday, the fifth in three weeks, saying the party had become too remote from the people who’d elected it. The departure of Mehmet Erdemir is sure to stoke further media speculation about splits within PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), though it retains a large majority in Parliament. “The AKP has reached a point where it is far from showing sensitivity in protecting our national interests,” Erdemir, from the party’s nationalist wing, said in a written statement. He cited Iraq and Cyprus as issues where the government had betrayed public trust.

SARAJEVO (AFP) - Some 18,000 bodies of victims of executions during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war have been exhumed in the past decade from 363 mass graves found throughout the Balkan country, an official said yesterday. “Since the end of the war, we have found 363 mass graves, that is, graves with over five bodies,” the head of the Muslim commission for missing people, Amor Masovic, told AFP. Most mass graves were found around the eastern town of Srebrenica.

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan called yesterday for an impartial study of Armenian claims that their people suffered genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turkish troops during and after WWI. Turkey has always denied the genocide claims but has been irked by growing calls, especially from within the EU, that it recognize a genocide occurred as an historic fact. “We have opened our archives to those people who claim there was genocide. If they are sincere, they should also open their archives,” Erdogan said. (Reuters)

The chief UN war crimes prosecutor has effectively doomed Croatia’s hopes of starting EU entry talks next week by telling EU governments that Zagreb is still not cooperating fully with her tribunal. Carla del Ponte told EU president Luxembourg, in a withering letter circulated to member states yesterday, that Zagreb was still not doing all it could to arrest and hand over fugitive General Ante Gotovina. The European Commission said yesterday the EU would not open accession talks with Croatia as planned if the report was negative. (Reuters)