Waiting For Mr. Silajdzic

Bosnian politicians are still anxiously waiting to see what former Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic is going to do, Sarajevo weekly Svet said. Silajdzic said he would try for a top post in next September's elections and confirmed he is going to form a new party. Some other parties are already flocking to him. Rasim Kadic's Liberals are not keeping their contacts and offers secret. "We agreed on some elements of a possible joint political appearance," Kadic said after talks with Silajdzic. The Social democrats led by Zlatko Lagumdzija and Selim Beslagic seem to be doing the same but what will happen after all those intense contacts with Silajdzic is hard to predict. What will happen is for the former Prime Minister and one of the most popular Bosnian politicians to say.

Monument to Helen of Savoy

Queen Helen foundation chairman Sergio Karadjordjevic said a monument would be raised to Italian queen Helen of Savoy, daughter of Montenegrin King Nikola I, in Cetinje next summer.

Zagreb and the Hague

The Croatian government submitted a draft constitutional law on Croatia's cooperation with the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague on February 12. Parliament is scheduled to debate the law on February 26.

Justice minister Miroslav Separovic said the law envisages that the tribunal has to go through the Croatian government when submitting extradition requests. The government would then send the request to the district court where the accused lives which would then "make an adequate ruling". The law allows an appeal to the supreme court and if there is none the documents on the accused will be handed to the supreme court whose ruling is final.

Nacional weekly conducted a poll which showed that public opinion is divided over the extradition of accused war criminals Blaskic, Kordic and five other Croats. Some 26% of the polled feel they should be handed over while 33% opposed the extradition. About 30% are undecided and 11% had no answer.

Partnership For Yugoslavia

A proposal on Yugoslavia joining NATO's Partnership For Peace program was submitted to federal parliament on February 13 by New Democracy deputy Miroslav Stefanovic. His proposal says parliament should debate the proposal urgently since the "defence and security interests" of the country demand it especially in the present situation given the relations in the former Yugoslavia and south eastern Europe as a whole.

Stefanovic said joining the Partnership program is "the most important step" on the road to Europe and the quickest way to see the kind of army the country needs.

Belgrade and the Hague

A group of Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) deputies in federal parliament submitted a draft law on FRY cooperation with the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague which establishes tribunal priority over Yugoslav courts for crimes in the jurisdiction of the tribunal. Under the draft law, the FRY authorities would cooperate with the tribunal in all investigations of criminal acts including identifying and locating persons under investigation, securing witness statements and providing documents.

The tribunal would communicate with the Yugoslav authorities through the federal justice ministry which is obliged to send the Serbian public prosecutor and supreme court requests within 15 days along with statements from all interested parties.

Sljivancanin Promoted

A VREME reporter wanted a statement from Lt. Colonel Veselin Sljivancanin on the extradition of two high-ranking Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) officers to the Hague so he dialed the Masline garrison in Podgorica where the former Major was transferred and promoted to Lt. Colonel and commander of the 5th motorized brigade after operation Vukovar. VREME was told that Sljivancanin had been promoted to full Colonel and was at another phone number.

There was no public statement on the promotion of the man who is wanted by the Hague tribunal. Rumors of the promotion have been heard in Podgorica over the past few days followed by another rumor that he could be promoted to general and transferred to Belgrade.

Deaf Explosions

"Hand grenade explosions shook five refugee camps in Kosovo (Vucitrn, Pec, Kosovska Mitrovica, Pristina and Suva Reka) on Sunday evening," Tanjug news agency reported on Tuesday. The report said no injuries were reported but material damages had been caused and the refugees and local population were upset.

The Tanjug report was carried by many of the Serbian media but without any great publicity.

It was hard to get any reliable information in Kosovo itself or even comments apart from the fact that refugee camps in Kosovo have regular police protection. Some of them even have special night guards.

One of the reasons that was mentioned as the cause of the lax security was the screening of one of the most popular shows on Serbian TV that night.

Flu Epidemic

The flu surprised us again. Serbia's health ministry declared an epidemic in the republic when the number of cases in Belgrade reached 20,000. In Vojvodina, some 15,000 cases of the A-2 flu virus were recorded and the southern parts of the republic are also affected. The health department in Vranje established that the virus came in from Bulgaria and spread to the rest of the republic.

Most of the sick are school children (over 60%). Health care centers are swamped by patients and the phones are ringing all the time in the emergency health services.

Hospital visits have been banned because of the epidemic but the flu is spreading among medical workers in Serbia.

Biserka Obradovic, a doctor in Belgrade's Stari Grad medical center said the number of cases has grown by 40%. She said the most frequent complications are sinus infections, pneumonia and bronchitis. She advised against taking antibiotics without consulting a doctor. This flu virus causes high temperatures which can last for days.

For now the epidemic is still spreading.

Matroz

The FRY's only paper producer, Matroz in Sremska Mitrovica, is decaying in its efforts to enable enough copies of newspapers every day. "We didn't want to leave newspaper publishers with newsprint and force our people to read the foreign press during the sanctions," a shift chief at Matroz said.

The sanctions have been suspended and under the logic of that statement there's no reason for the local press not to be published. Whatever the problem, Matroz had wood supplies to keep its machines going for just two hours if the technology process allowed the machines to be started for that short a time. But the problem is something else, short and sad. That state of Serbia eliminated a management team in Matroz that intended to produce paper seriously and sell it on the market; Matroz became a so-called public company and went into partnership with other similar companies. Three state management teams later and the result is the initial debt grew from five to 60 million dinars and the cost of reviving production to 65 million, double what the factory's estimated value is.

But we don't face an abolishment of newspapers but higher wood and oil prices.

Ambassadors

Under a decree by FRY President Zoran Lilic, Slobodan Unkovic, Serbian deputy prime minister and minister for science and technology, was appointed FRY ambassador to China last November. As such he accompanied Lilic on his visit to China. In the meantime Unkovic is still in Belgrade as deputy prime minister, attending cabinet meetings and working in his ministry receiving delegations that have nothing to do with China. No one knows whether Unkovic is being paid as a minister or ambassador nor why he isn't in Beijing. The problem does not lose importance even if you take into account opinions that the situation does not really affect FRY-China relations. This is not an isolated case since the Yugoslav foreign minister is still holding his post of ambassador to Greece and being paid for it. Probably Balsa Spadijer, the next FRY ambassador to Budapest, won't have to stop his job as president of the Serbian constitutional court just because he's getting up to 5,000 USD a month in ambassadorial pay. In that context, the announced international recognition of the FRY won't be good news to some Yugoslav diplomats. 5,000 dollars in Belgrade goes much further than in Athens. Danilo Z. Markovic should sent a letter of complaint from Moscow. He's been working there and suffering damages.

Harmony

The German Mark on the black market stood at 3.7 dinars this week with a tendency to rise and the dinar's tendency to drop. The year started badly (recession, inflation, a shortage of exports etc.) so it's no wonder that all three Belgrade economics institutes and the businessmen they polled agree on the causes of the situation: the state has overburdened the economy, taken the first step towards an overall crisis including hyperinflation. They all agree so much that even the regime media aren't keeping quiet.

In any case, the state is showing no tendency to lower its spending.

Return

Former Gavrilovic Petrinja director and Republic of Serb Krajina prime minister Borislav Mikelic is set to become chairman of a non-governmental commission for resolving the status and return of Krajina Serb refugees.

Two types of opponents surfaced at once. The first say that Mikelic, along with Milan Martic and Milan Babic, rejected the Z-4 plan stupidly as the only chance to prevent the fall of the Krajina. The second recall his cooperativeness in negotiations with Croatia and say that was treason and, like the Serbian Radical Party, propose Franjo Tudjman as chairman of the commission instead of Mikelic "since they care about the Serbs equally". Both agree that Mikelic had the full support of the Serbian president and his wife in everything he did.