SARAJEVO (Reuters) – The West should stay on in the Balkans because the unresolved status of Serbia’s breakaway Kosovo province has created regional instability, Bosnia’s top international peacekeeper was quoted yesterday as saying. “The instability is still visible not only in Bosnia but in the whole area of the Western Balkans,” Hans-Jochen Witthauer, commander of the European Union’s peacekeeping force EUFOR, told the Dnevni List daily. “That is why we are keeping a minimum force to be capable to intervene if war breaks out again,” said the rear admiral, who commands a 2,500-strong force. “The resolution of Kosovo’s status creates problems that have impact on the entire region,” Witthauer said.

SOFIA (Reuters) – Bulgarian teachers have rejected a pay rise deal agreed between their trade unions and the government, pushing their strike into a sixth week, officials said yesterday. Around half of the striking teachers refused to go back to the classrooms and turned down a Friday deal for a gradual 46 percent raise of an average teacher salary to 650 levs ($479) by July, and demanded higher pay, trade unions said in a statement. The industrial action, the biggest in the Balkan country since communism collapsed in 1989, has paralyzed schools and put pressure on the government to boost living standards in the poorest EU member.

A Turkish couple in Vienna suspected of forcing their 18-year-old daughter to give up her Austrian boyfriend were arrested and placed in custody, Austrian police said yesterday. The young woman said her parents had used force and threatened to send her back to Turkey if she did not end the relationship. Her parents, a 49-year-old man and his 46-year-old wife face a charge of “aggravated restraint” of their daughter, according to APA agency. (AFP)

Bosnian police yesterday arrested three former Bosnian-Serb soldiers suspected of war crimes against Muslim civilians early in the 1992-95 war, the state prosecutor said in a statement. It said that Mirko Pekez, 41, and his namesake, 42, were arrested in the western town of Jajce and Milorad Savic, 37, in the town of Gradiska on suspicion that “as members of the Bosnian-Serb army... they killed 23 and injured four Muslims.” “The three are suspected of committing the criminal offense of war crimes against civilians in the area of Jajce in September 1992 and will be delivered to the prosecutor’s office in charge of the case,” it said. (Reuters)