DIYARBAKIR (AFP) - Some 3,000 people turned out for the opening ceremony yesterday of one of Turkey's first Kurdish language teaching centers in the mainly-Kurdish southeast of the country under EU-inspired reforms, the owner said. The center, in the city of Batman, is set to begin classes on April 1 and some 200 people have already signed up to be among the first students, Aydin Unesi told AFP. «We have the capacity of teaching 500 people in one term. We expect more people to apply for the language courses in the future,» he said. Unesi was able to open his teaching center after months of battling bureaucratic hurdles, including the refusal of an operating license because the doors were too narrow.

PRISTINA (AFP) - The United Nations top official in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri, announced yesterday that the province's second general elections are to be held in October this year. «The election date will be Saturday, October 23,» Holkeri said at a press conference alongside visiting UN undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno. Holkeri said the second general elections for the province's 120-seat multi-ethnic assembly would include closed lists of candidates, meaning the political parties will themselves designate the legislators.

Serb extremists are suspected of sending a threatening letter to two pro-democracy politicians who were prominent in the movement to oust former President Slobodan Milosevic, a radio station reported yesterday. The letter, signed by a previously unknown group of expatriates purportedly calling themselves the Revolutionary Tribunal of Diaspora in Chicago, was sent jointly to the Parliament speaker in Serbia's northern Vojvodina province, Nenad Canak, and the leader of the province's largest party of ethnic Hungarians, Jozef Kasa. Police in Novi Sad said yesterday they were investigating the matter and declined to comment on the nature of the threat. (AP)

Turkish riot police on Saturday clashed with hundreds of students demonstrating in the capital Ankara against state control of universities, detaining several of them, the CNN-Turk news channel said. Truncheon-wielding officers, backed by armored vehicles, used pepper gas and a water cannon to disperse the 1,500-strong crowd gathered in downtown Kizilay Square on the grounds that the demonstration was illegal. (AFP)