ANKARA - Local authorities seeking to boost their budgets resulted in Turkey counting at least 3.65 million non-existent people in a national census in 2000. “It has been established so far that 3,651,000 people were recorded as imaginary population,” Sefik Yildizeli, the country’s chief statistician, told reporters yesterday. Officials acknowledge that the 2000 census, which reported a national population of 64,059,000, was distorted by fake counts at scores of municipalities, whose state budgets are tied to population size. (Reuters)

PRISTINA - UN police broke up a protest in Kosovo’s capital yesterday, where students gathered to demand more power for the province’s newly elected assembly. UN and local police said they charged at some 200 ethnic Albanian Pristina University students, who initially numbered nearly 2,000, saying the demonstration was unauthorized. No injuries were reported. The protest came after Kosovo’s 120-seat multiethnic assembly convened to issue a declaration on the tense northern town of Kosovska Mitrovica, a frequent site of violent clashes between the Serb minority and the Albanian majority. (AFP)

Forensic experts have unearthed the bodies of 27 ethnic Serbs who were killed in southern Croatia during the country’s 1995 offensive to recapture territory held by rebel Serbs, officials said yesterday. Local experts finished unearthing the bodies yesterday from a cemetery in Korenica, 115 kilometers (70 miles) south of the capital, Zagreb, said Ivan Gruic, the government official in charge of exhumations. Gruic said the exhumation was ordered by a local court, but that all evidence uncovered would also be handed over to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. (AP)

Bosnia’s top international envoy, Wolfgang Petritsch, urged the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) yesterday to aid the process of returning refugees to the Balkan country. “We cannot allow the return process to fail due to a lack of assistance, at a time when return is politically possible and really happening,” he said in Vienna in his final address as Bosnia’s top envoy to the 55-nation body’s permanent council. Petritsch said there had been a breakthrough in refugee return in recent years, with the number of so-called minority returns leaping to 67,000 in 2000 and to 92,000 in 2001. (AFP)

A Serbian newspaper which reported on atrocities committed by the Yugoslav army in Kosovo and was for a time shut down by the authorities was yesterday awarded the Free Media Pioneer Award by the International Press Institute (IPI). The body, made up of thousands of directors and editors of media worldwide, gave the award to the Danas daily, which it said had succeeded in presenting “an accurate, impartial view of events occurring in the region while standing up to constant pressure from the Serbian authorities.” (AFP)