DAMASCUS (AFP) - Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani here yesterday called on neighboring countries not to interfere in the situation in the troubled, oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. “Kirkuk is an Iraqi Kurd city. The question of this city is an internal Iraqi affair, neighboring countries should not interfere,” said Barzani, leader of Iraq’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), following talks with Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam. Neighbors Syria and Turkey, which both have sizable Kurdish minorities of their own, are fiercely opposed to any moves to establish an independent Kurdish state.

PRISTINA (AFP) - Serbs will take part in next weekend’s legislative elections in Kosovo after all, a senior electoral commission official said at the weekend. A moderate political group calling itself the “Serb List for Kosovo and Metohija (SLKM)” has been certified to contend the Saturday polls, the official said. Oliver Ivanovic, head of the group, said participation in the elections would improve relations with the province’s majority Albanians. “They will talk with us and we could reduce tensions,” he said.

The husband of Kurdish activist Leyla Zana was released on Saturday after spending a night in police custody following his return to Turkey after nine years in exile, his lawyer told AFP. Mehdi Zana, a prominent Kurdish politician himself, was detained on Friday while going through passport control at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport on the basis of arrest warrants issued against him in absentia. He was taken to an Istanbul court on Saturday, where the judge decided to free him on the grounds that charges leveled against him in the past had ceased to constitute an offense under Turkey’s recent democracy reforms. (AFP)

Serbia’s President Boris Tadic on Saturday shrugged off attempts by allies of former President Slobodan Milosevic to unseat him, and argued that the threatened impeachment could benefit his pro-Western party by triggering early elections. The initiative, yet to be discussed in Serbia’s parliament, “could lead to a disbanding of Parliament, a collapse of the government and early parliamentary elections,” he told a gathering of his Democratic Party in Belgrade. (AP)

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin arrived in Romania yesterday for a two-day visit. He is to sign three contracts worth more than 900 million euros (US$ 1.1 billion). Raffarin also was expected to discuss international adoptions with Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase. (AP)