Honorary Consul

Udaya Nanayakara, a businessman from Colombo, is the first of about 100 people in 67 countries the Yugoslav federal government decided to appoint honorary consul. The names of the others haven’t been released yet. Honorary consults in the Ivory Coast, Brazil, Israel, Madagascar, Burkina Faso will be named soon. The former Yugoslavia had 26 honorary consuls with 11 of them still retaining that title.

The title of honorary consul is bestowed on natives of the host country and does not carry diplomatic privileges. It can be compared to an honorary doctorate. The honorary consuls will have the right to fly the FRY flag and have a plaque with the state seal on their homes and will get seals at the expense of the FRY.

Spokesmen for the foreign ministry said the network of amateur diplomats will improve the FRY’s reputation.

Goldstone’s heir

Canadian Louise Arbour became the chief prosecutor of the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague on October 1 replacing Richard Goldstone who was appointed a supreme court judge in his native South Africa. Before leaving for the Hague the 40 year old Canadian was a supreme court and appeals court judge in Ontario. She also taught at the university of York and headed a team of special investigators formed to check conditions in Canadian women’s prisons.

At her first press conference she urged an expanded mandate for the international forces in Bosnia to include hunting down indicted war criminals and opposed trials in absentia.

Sanctions Fall - The Outer Wall Remains

Four years and four months after they were imposed the sanctions against the FRY were lifted on October 1 when the UN Security Council adopted a new resolution to replace resolution 757 of May 30, 1992 in accord with the Dayton agreement.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic interpreted the lifting of the sanctions as his personal victory. He appeared on Serbian state TV (RTS) at 3:00 a.m. to say that "today we have come out of the worst period in our recent history".

His speech and its media presentation leads to the conclusion that the lifting of the sanctions will be the regime’s main trump card for the elections. Milosevic added that "as of today our future depends on our own work".

In essence, the new resolution (1022) won’t change anything, not Yugoslavia’s status in the UN or its relations with international financial institutions, nor has it opened the door to economic recovery through much needed credit lines. The FRY still faces the outer wall of sanctions which is all the more difficult to get over since it was never formalized. The outer wall is a number of demands from the great powers which the FRY still has to meet. That wall was formulated in Dayton at US demand and unlike the formal UN sanctions which were imposed to stop the war in Bosnia it covers the accountability of the people who waged the war and prevents future armed clashes.

We know some of its details; full cooperation with the Hague tribunal, a normalization of relations with all the newly created states, a solution to the Kosovo problem and other things. The FRY’s return to the international community depends on those conditions.

120 Suicides in Belgrade

In the first eight months of this year, 120 people killed themselves in Belgrade, city statistics office chief Radmila Vicentijevic told Blic daily. She said the number of suicides rose with the coming of autumn. In previous years Belgrade recorded an annual 180 suicides. She added that in 1992. 243 people committed suicide.

Montenegrin Mascot

The Montenegrin government brought in supermodel Claudia Schiffer to promote the republic’s tourist facilities for 1997. Schiffer even shot an promotion video on Sveti Stefan. The 10,000 USD an hour model was hired to do a marketing campaign for the Montenegrin coast. Her ads will be screened across Europe and posters of her in Montenegro will be featured in US travel agencies.