BELGRADE (AP) - Serbia’s new prime minister yesterday scaled down his harsh rhetoric against the UN war crimes tribunal, saying he would seek a balance between cooperating with the court and safeguarding the republic’s stability. The comments by Vojislav Kostunica appeared aimed at alleviating fears that Serbia would lose badly needed Western aid if the new Cabinet pointedly refuses to extradite suspects sought by the UN court in The Hague. “We will struggle to find the path forward through dialogue with the Hague court,” Kostunica said. “I shall try to find a balance... that would meet Serbia’s international obligations while not jeopardizing our stability,” he added. “That will be my primary concern.”

SARAJEVO (AP) - The flight data and cockpit voice recorders from a plane that crashed on February 26, killing the president of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, may shed little light onto the accident because both were old and malfunctioning, an investigator said yesterday. The contents of the so-called “black boxes” were analyzed in Germany, but the usual method failed to offer enough data to determine why the plane went down, said Salko Begic, who heads Bosnia’s investigative team. “There were technical problems and we are dealing with old technology — voice and data recorders from the 1960s, aluminum tapes which are not used anymore,” Begic said.

Judges sentenced a Bosnian Serb to 18 years in jail at the Hague tribunal yesterday for murdering and sexually assaulting Muslim men held in a notorious Serb-run detention camp during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Ranko Cesic confessed last year to shooting and beating 10 prisoners to death and forcing two Muslim brothers to perform sexual acts on each other at gunpoint in the Luka camp near Brcko in May 1992. (Reuters)

Retired Croatian generals Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac turned themselves in to the UN war crimes court in The Hague yesterday after an indictment against them was made public earlier this week, a court spokesman said. Cermak and Markac will be in court for their initial appearance today to enter a plea to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their role in Operation Storm, a 1995 military offensive aimed at seizing control of the Krajina region. (AFP)

Thousands of Albanians attended the funeral yesterday of the son of Albanian President Alfred Moisiu who was killed in a car accident a day earlier. Albania’s top government officials and politicians, and members of the diplomatic community paid their respects to the Moisiu family. Admir Moisiu, 32, and two others were in a four-wheel-drive vehicle Wednesday morning when it skidded off a cliff into the Drino River at Uji i Ftohte, in the Tepelene district, 200 kilometers (125 miles) south of Tirana. (AP)