ISTANBUL (AFP) – Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan flew to New York yesterday to drum up support in the United Nations for his country’s bid for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council. Speaking before his departure from Istanbul, Babacan said he would meet with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the UN ambassadors of an array of countries, who will elect two new non-permanent Security Council members for 2009-2010 in October. “We will explain to them our foreign policy and the contributions that Turkey has made to security, stability and peace in the region,” Babacan said. Austria and Iceland are the other two candidates for the seats.

ZAGREB (AP) – The head of Croatia’s state-run health insurance agency has fired his subordinate for saying “some patients must die” – a remark that caused an uproar in the former Yugoslav republic. The agency head, Veceslav Bergman, said yesterday the comment by Tonci Buble – who headed the agency’s medicine department – was taken out of context but still harmed the agency’s reputation. Croatian media quoted Buble as using that remark when asked about a young patient who could not afford to buy necessary medicine. The health agency was reportedly hesitant to cover her expenses. Buble insists he was never asked about a specific patient; he was explaining that modern medicine still has not discovered enough drugs to fight all terminal illnesses.

ZAGREB (AFP) – The commander of a World War II concentration camp known as the “Croatian Auschwitz,” who was serving a 20-year sentence for the deaths of 2,000 inmates, died overnight, media reported yesterday. Dinko Sakic, 86, was sentenced in October 1999 to the maximum 20 years in prison for crimes against humanity. He was found guilty of mistreating, torturing and killing prisoners in the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp that was run by the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime which ruled Croatia during the war. Sakic was jailed for causing the deaths of at least 2,000 inmates in the Jasenovac camp, 60 kilometers (40 miles) southeast of Zagreb, between May and November 1944. He was extradited from Argentina in 1998.

Croatian police have detained a national of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) on suspicion that he used a farm worker as slave labor, police said yesterday. The FYROM national, 29, employed the man at his farm near the northern Croatian town of Porec before allegedly seizing his documents and forcing him to work without pay, the HINA news agency cited police as saying. The 22-year-old victim was also physically and mentally maltreated during his employment from the start of the year until mid-July, before he was freed after managing to contact police earlier this month. Under Croatian law, the suspect faces up to 10 years in jail if convicted. (AFP)

Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) has made backup plans in case the Constitutional Court closes it down for Islamist activities, a senior member said yesterday. “If the party is closed, there are B and C plans but they will only come into effect if necessary,” the AKP’s deputy chairman, Saban Disli, told reporters, according to Anatolia news agency. Disli did not give details. “We are rather hopeful, in contrast to the expectations of some circles... My expectation is that the closure case will be resolved in favor of our party and country,” Disli said. (Reuters)

A former Bosnian Serb police chief pleaded innocent yesterday to 12 charges of murder, torture and persecution of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992. Stojan Zupljanin, 56, was arrested last month in Serbia after eight years on the run, one of the last fugitives sought by the UN Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. Prosecutors say Zupljanin had overall responsibility for the police in the Serb-dominated Krajina region of Bosnia, including Serb-run internment camps where thousands of Muslims and Croats were killed. Tens of thousands of non-Serbs were expelled from the region during the last nine months of 1992, the period covered by the indictment, in what prosecutors say was a criminal attempt to create a greater Serbian state through ethnic cleansing. (AP)