ZAGREB (AFP) - The Croatian government should do more to encourage the return of ethnic Serbs who fled the country during the 1991-1995 Serbo-Croatian war, the mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Croatia said yesterday. “It is important that there is a stronger, explicit government endorsement of refugee return,” the head of the pan-European security body, Peter Semneby, told journalists when presenting the OSCE’s latest report on Croatia. According to United Nations figures, some 280,000 Croatian Serbs fled the country during and after the war. So far only 100,000 of them have returned.

BELGRADE (AP) - UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan met Yugoslav leaders yesterday amid a scandal over Yugoslavia’s arms deals with Iraq and demands that the Balkan country cooperate better with the UN war crimes tribunal. Upon Annan’s arrival in Belgrade, thousands of diehard supporters of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic rallied at Belgrade’s main square, demanding that Annan order the UN tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, to immediately release Milosevic.

An inmate died yesterday after refusing food for more than 500 days in a nationwide hunger strike against Turkey’s maximum-security prison system, a human rights group said yesterday. Imdat Bulut, a member of the outlawed People’s Revolutionary Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C, died in a hospital in Istanbul, Turkey’s Human Rights Association said. Bulut was the 59th person to die in the strike. (AP)

The International environmental protection organization WWF launched a program aimed at protecting Croatia’s central and southern Adriatic coast and islands, which host one of the richest biodiversities in the Mediterranean. “If we are able to save those areas, we will be saving most of the diversity which is present in the Mediterranean Sea,” an official of the World Wildlife Fund’s Mediterranean Program, Paolo Guglielmi, told journalists. Croatia’s coast and islands are among the 10 “last paradises” for biodiversity in the Mediterranean, according to a WWF study. (AFP)

Nearly 150 coalminers from Horasti in southwestern Romania barricaded themselves into mine shafts yesterday to protest a plan to slash their jobs, a union source said. The miners are demanding that some 600 jobs in the mine are maintained, and if not that each redundant miner be paid $20,000 compensation. Horasti is one of a number of Romanian mines not making profits, and is to be shut down by 2010 as part of a program of reforms in the mining sector. (AFP)

Turkey has deported or denied entry visas to nine separatist leaders from Russia’s breakaway republic of Chechnya, the Turkish ambassador to Moscow said yesterday. “These people will never enter Turkey,” Ambassador Kurtulus Taskent said at a news conference. Among nine Chechen separatist leaders, he mentioned Movladi Udugov and Ruslan Gelayev, both prominent rebel warlords who have played an active role in the war. (AP)