Belgrade (AFP) - Yugoslavia is seeking US and international help in tracking down its most wanted war crimes suspects, under pressure of losing vital financial aid from Washington, officials said yesterday. Both governments were ready to cooperate with each other, Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said of Washington and Belgrade after meeting US envoy for war crimes Pierre-Richard Prosper. “What is important for me is that the message is understood in Washington and other world centers that... (the Yugoslav government) needs support and help” to track down and arrest the fugitives, Svilanovic said.

Belgrade (AP) - Yugoslavia might have to ground its fighter jets within a year because the country lacks sufficient spare parts, the air force commander warned in remarks published yesterday. Financially crippled and devastated by NATO bombing two years ago, the Yugoslav air force “might be grounded by the year 2004 due to a lack of resources,” Gen. Mirko Tomovic, air force commander, said in an interview with Belgrade’s state-run Borba daily. “Unless we procure new fighter aircraft, I don’t know how we will control our country’s air space,” Tomovic said.

About 1,000 former fighters of the 1989 uprising which toppled former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu rallied yesterday in front of the presidential palace to protest at government plans to reduce their benefits. In a statement released later yesterday, President Ion Iliescu said a new law regulating benefits was needed to bring the benefits in line with “the new economic and social reality.” (AP)

Several hundred heavily armed members of a special police unit that fought ethnic Albanian rebels in 2001 blocked a key road in the Former Yugsolav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) yesterday to demand that their wages be paid and their future status be resolved. Armed with weapons such as machine guns and rocket launchers, the angry reservists of the notorious “Lions” unit stopped traffic on the road linking the capital Skopje with Kosovo. Police spokeswoman Mirjana Konteska told AP that “the situation is tense, but negotiations have started in order to achieve a reasonable solution.” (AP)

Turkish police detained some 15 people yesterday in a demonstration here against a possible US-led military strike on neighboring Iraq, the Anatolia news agency reported. The protesters gathered in the downtown Beyoglu district, in Istanbul’s European quarter, where they set up a ballot box and asked passers-by to cast votes as to whether war should be waged against Iraq. Security forces stepped in and took the protesters into custody, Anatolia said. (AFP)

A power failure yesterday morning in northwestern Croatia, including the capital of Zagreb, caused chaos before it ended hours later. The outage, caused by a failure in a transformer station, caused traffic jams as streetlights stopped working. It also halted trams, forcing many residents to walk to work. (AP)