SKOPJE - Ethnic Albanians set up roadblocks yesterday to stop multiethnic police patrols from entering 17 villages in a tense northwestern region formerly held by rebels, a government official said. Angry villagers blocked the main roads around the city of Tetovo, in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, preventing police from reaching eight villages in the area, government spokesman Zoran Tanevski said. Barricades were also erected near the western town of Gostivar, sealing off nine nearby villages populated by ethnic Albanians. International observers and Western diplomats criticized the action, calling it a violation of the EU-brokered peace agreement. (AP)

STRASBOURG - Turkey must do more to improve the practices in its prisons and police stations where brutality and maltreatment of women prisoners occur in torture-chamber conditions, the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee said yesterday. Committee experts, who visited 40 Turkish detention sites last September, cited a “gradual improvement” but called for changes in several worrying areas, according to the report published with Ankara’s agreement. “In particular, resort to methods such as suspension by the arms and the application of electric shocks would appear to be far less frequent than in the past,” but complaints of bad treatment remain numerous, the report said. (AFP)

Bosnia joined the Council of Europe at a formal ceremony yesterday, a key step toward integrating into Europe for the impoverished Balkan country still struggling with the 1992-95 war legacy. “Bosnia and Herzegovina is today formally enlisted as a European country,” Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija said. (Reuters)

The Turkish army has filed a complaint against prominent Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a 1992 speech in which he allegedly spoke out against the armed forces and praised radical Islam, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. The army’s complaint to the Justice Ministry said that Erdogan’s remarks amounted to “insulting and treating the armed forces with contempt” and “aimed at inciting hatred and enmity among the public by observing religious differences,” both of which are punishable crimes under the penal code. (AFP)

Bulgaria’s Parliament yesterday passed a law that limits access to files of all former employees and collaborators of communist-era secret services. The new law, initiated by the ruling National Movement for Simeon II, defines the scope of state secrets and is among legislative requirements that Sofia needs to fulfil to join NATO. It states that all information that could help determine if someone had collaborated with the secret services is a state secret. (Reuters)