ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey will not retry jailed Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan after Europe’s top human rights court ruled his 1999 prosecution was unfair, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was quoted as saying yesterday. But Gul did not rule out taking up an alternative recommendation from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that the original case against Ocalan be reopened. “The court said retry him or reopen the file due to this or that procedural inadequacy,” the newspaper Milliyet quoted Gul as saying in an interview with television station Kanal D.

PODGORICA (AP) - The Danish foreign minister said yesterday that the European Union will respect the outcome of an independence referendum next year in Montenegro, Serbia’s junior partner in the two-member union. “We are for democracy and we must respect the source of democracy,” Per Stig Moeller said at the end of his three-day tour of the Balkans.

Albania’s 140-member Parliament was dissolved yesterday ahead of general elections scheduled for July 3, assembly spokeswoman Katjusha Pogace said. Prime Minister Fatos Nano’s governing Socialists are vying for a third consecutive term, while former president Sali Berisha has argued that his opposition Democratic Party will bring Albania closer to the EU. (AP)

President Traian Basescu has criticized the government for the way it handled recent flooding in Romania, the worst to hit the country in decades. Basescu said that Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu had showed “a certain inefficiency,” in dealing with the floods that swept Romania in April killing at least four people and leading to the evacuation of more than 3,000 people. “If the presidency had more executive powers I would have sat at the head of the table every morning at seven, and I would have got reports about what was happening,” Basescu said. (AP)

The leaders of Balkan countries vowed yesterday to transform their countries’ cultural heritage into a resource for a rapid economic development in the troubled region. At a meeting in the Black Sea port of Varna dubbed “Common Past and Shared Heritage,” they declared, “The Balkans have been a crossroads for millennia, and cultural routes are a resource for economic development and an opportunity for changing the aspect of the region.” Among the participants were leaders from Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and Montenegro, as well as the heads of UNESCO and the Council of Europe. (AP)