BRUSSELS (Reuters) – UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte expressed concern yesterday that the international community was losing interest in supporting her efforts to bring Serbian war crimes suspects to justice. “We have to close the door in 2010... and we have the international community that is no longer so engaged to help us,” she told a news conference after meeting with Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht. The mandate of the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) expires in 2010. “If we still believe in the rule of law... if we still believe in international justice, I need the international community to support our mandate,” Del Ponte said.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union criticized Croatian President Stjepan Mesic yesterday for accusing his Italian counterpart of racism in a spat over a World War Two massacre of up to 15,000 Italians by Yugoslav communists. “The language used by the Croatian president seemed inappropriate,” European Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen told a daily new briefing. She declined to say whether Mesic’s comments would hurt Croatia’s negotiations to join the EU which started in 2005. Mesic said this week that Italian President Giorgio Napolitano’s remarks on the massacre contained racist elements. “It is impossible to overlook elements of open racism, historical revisionism and political revanchism in those statements, which hardly fit with a declared wish for improvement of bilateral relations,” Mesic said in a statement.

Bulgarian lawmakers passed provisions of a new EU election bill yesterday, preventing Bulgarians who live abroad from voting in elections for the European bloc’s parliament. The law stipulates that only people who have resided in Bulgaria or in another EU country for the last three months would be allowed to vote in European Parliament elections. The Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the junior partner in the center-left coalition government, represents Bulgaria’s 800,000 ethnic Turks, or some 10 percent of the population. It criticized the measure, saying it discriminated against Bulgarian Turks who lived in Turkey but retained Bulgarian citizenship. Deputy party leader Lyutvi Mestan said the provision would be challenged in the Constitutional Court. (AP)

Over 1,000 subway workers in the Romanian capital of Bucharest took to the streets yesterday to demand higher wages and better work conditions. The workers are demanding a 40 percent pay rise and threatening to strike, an action that would likely paralyze traffic in the crowded city of over 2 million. (AP)