AP - July 31st, 2002

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- A former warlord once considered among Bosnia's richest men was convicted of war crimes by a Croatian court Wednesday and sentenced to a maximum 20 years in prison.

Fikret Abdic, also known as Babo, was found guilty of participating in the detention and killing of fellow Muslims during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. He was arrested in Croatia in June 2001.

The 2,200-page indictment accused Abdic of opening detention camps for his Muslim opponents in the state he created in 1993 in northwestern Bosnia.

A total of about 5,000 people were detained in those camps, and at least three of them died as a result of torture there, according to the verdict returned by chief judge Jasminka Jerinic-Mucnjak.

``Punishment must be the gravest to clearly show that civilized and democratic societies condemn war crimes, especially when committed by the highest echelons of power,'' she said in the district court in Karlovac, 25 miles southwest of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Like Bosnia, Croatia former was part of Yugoslavia.

Before the war, when Bosnia was a part of the former Yugoslavia, Abdic ran a company that distributed produce and ran grocery stories throughout the country. He reportedly made millions, before his business declared bankruptcy in 1987. Abdic was subsequently tried and jailed for fraud.

After the collapse of communist Yugoslavia, Abdic separated from the breakaway Bosnian government in September 1993 and proclaimed an autonomous region around Velika Kladusa, 125 miles northwest of the capital, Sarajevo.

His forces were backed by Serb fighters from Belgrade, the capital of what remained of Yugoslavia, as he turned his back on fellow Muslims in an attempt to preserve his self-declared fiefdom.

He fled to Croatia in 1995 when he was toppled from power and was granted citizenship in 1995.

Though the Croatian constitution forbids extradition of its nationals, Croatian officials decided to put Karlovac on trial here for his actions in Bosnia.

BELGRADE , Jul 29 (Tanjug) - The Serbian parliament committee for administrative issues decided Monday to expell 45 MP's of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS).

Before adopting this decision, the committee abrogated its decision of June 11, when it expelled 21 DSS MP's for absenteeism.

NOVI SAD , July 27 (Tanjug) - The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) Presidency on Friday evening decided to expel the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) from this coalition and charged the DOS club in republican parliament to carry out the decision. Thirteen party representatives voted for the expulsion, two were against and one abstained, Presidency Chairman and League of Vojvodina Social Democrats President Nenad Canak said.

BELGRADE , July 26 (Tanjug) - Democratic Christian Party of Serbia (DHSS) leader Vladan Batic, together with DHSS members, handed over a list with 200,000 signatures for an independent Serbia to the Serbian parliament writing-office.

The parliament was given a request to debate on calling a referendum in which the citizens would vote on the issue.

Moscow, 26 July 2002 (RFE/RL) -- Russia today made public plans to build several nuclear reactors in Iran despite U.S. criticism of the project.

According to a long-term program approved earlier this week, Russia plans to construct up to six reactors at the southern Bushehr plant and other sites, expand conventional Iranian power stations, develop gas and oil deposits in Iran, jointly produce aircraft with Iran, and cooperate with Iran in communications and metallurgy.

Washington has been sharply critical of the Bushehr plans, arguing that they could help Iran acquire nuclear weapons.

Iran says the project will be subject to strict monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Dmitrii Rogozin today said that "neither Russia nor the U.S. are interested in other countries' use of peaceful nuclear energy for military purposes."

Prague, 25 July 2002 (RFE/RL) -- Former Federal Security Service (FSB) Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko, who is now living in Great Britain, testified by satellite link on 25 July before a public commission looking into the 1999 apartment-building bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities, Russian and Western news agencies reported the same day.

Litvinenko's representatives distributed to the commission copies of a handwritten document purported to be the testimony of Achemez Gochiyaev, who is wanted by the FSB in connection with the bombings.

According to the document, Gochiyaev was approached by an unidentified school friend -- who he believes was an FSB agent -- in 1999 to rent four basements in Moscow for use as storage. He did this, and only after two explosions did he figure out that the locations were the ones that he had rented. He claims he anonymously called the authorities and warned them about the other two locations, preventing additional explosions.

Russian authorities immediately blamed the bombings on Chechen terrorists, and used the explosions as the reason for launching the current campaign in the breakaway republic.

Exiled tycoon Boris Berezovskii has claimed publicly that the FSB actually organized the bombings in order to create a pretext to invade Chechnya. The FSB has denied these allegations.

Litvinenko obtained political asylum in London after blowing the whistle on an alleged plot by the FSB to assassinate Berezovskii. He was sentenced in absentia last month to a 3 1/2-year suspended sentence for abuse of power.

A Moscow court has sentenced two female members of the Portos group - Irina Derguzova and Tatyana Lomakina - to eight and six years in prison respectively.

They were accused of setting up an illegal armed movement and bullying and harassing underage group members.

Full story here. More about this scam trial and crazy judge who threatened to strip down here.

A court in Belarus has given a three-year suspended jail sentence to the former prime minister and opposition leader, Mikhail Chigir.

The court found Mr Chigir, who led the Belarus government from 1994 to 1996, guilty of tax evasion while he was working for a German company in Moscow in the late 1990s.

Full story here.

Moscow, 23 July 2002 (RFE/RL) -- Seven more people have drowned while swimming in Moscow's rivers and reservoirs over the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll since 1 June to 168, Interfax reports.

Most deaths are caused by people going into the water after drinking heavily.

Moscow has experienced an especially hot summer, with temperatures hovering around 30 degrees Celsius for much of this month.

PODGORICA , July 20 (Tanjug) - Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic scheduled the early parliamentary elections in the republic for October 6, Djukanovic's office said in a statement on Saturday.

The statement said that Djukanovic had reached this decision after the Montenegrin parliament on July 18 adopted a decision, under which its term was cut short.

BERLIN (AP) -- German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping will be replaced after revelations he accepted $72,000 from a public relations adviser, a senior member of the governing Social Democrats was quoted as saying Thursday.

Government officials had no immediate comment, but Scharping stopped touring military bases in western Germany to fly back to Berlin and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder canceled an appearance in southern Bayreuth.

``A decision has been made,'' Gernot Erler, the deputy leader in parliament of Schroeder's party, said in an advance copy of an interview with the daily newspaper Die Welt. ``There will be a personnel change at the top of the Defense Ministry.''

Scharping's ouster comes less than 10 weeks before national elections in which Schroeder is seeking a second term.

Scharping told the Bild daily newspaper he received $72,100 from public relations adviser Moritz Hunzinger for his future memoirs and for speeches at events sponsored by the public relations agency.

But Scharping said the payments were for deals concluded before he became a minister in 1998 and insisted he properly reported them to tax authorities.

German ministers are not allowed to receive any payments besides their salaries.

Scharping, who unsuccessfully challenged Helmut Kohl for the chancellorship in 1994, has been involved in several incidents that have embarrassed Schroeder's government.

Last summer, magazine photos showed Scharping and his girlfriend splashing in a pool on the Spanish resort island of Mallorca as German troops prepared to depart for Macedonia.

It then was revealed he used an air force plane to return overnight to Mallorca at taxpayers' expense.

This year, the opposition tried to oust Scharping over allegations he broke budget laws by promising Germany's partners to buy 73 A400M Airbus military transport planes even though parliament approved buying only 40.

LONDON (AP) -- Winding up a three-day meeting on how to depose Saddam Hussein, a group of former Iraqi military officers said Sunday they would support war crimes tribunals for the leader and his top aides once he is removed from power.

The 65 defectors from Saddam's forces issued a statement affirming their commitment to join any effort to topple him and promised the army would be subordinate to civilian authority in a democratic, post-Saddam Iraq.

The group said it would charge the main figures in Saddam's regime ``with full responsibility for the crimes committed by the authority during the years they have been in power,'' according to the statement read by former Brig. Gen. Tawfik al-Yassiri.

Al-Yassiri said the officers elected a 15-member military council, including some council members that are officers still living in Iraq.

Representatives of the U.S. State Department and Pentagon attended the group's opening session on Friday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington that American officials thought the meeting was ``a useful tool,'' although the United States did not help fund the conference.

Also present Friday was Prince Hassan of Jordan, the uncle of King Abdullah II, who said he was there as an observer and did not represent his country's government.

Jordan, which has denied Arab and Western media reports suggesting it would let U.S. troops use its air bases if America attacks Iraq, distanced itself from the gathering, saying Hassan's participation was an ``individual act.''

In their statement, the officers said they rejected ``the spirit of revenge'' and ethnic, nationalist and religious separatism. They vowed to support a democratic constitution and respect religious and human rights.

Al-Yassiri said the officers believed much of the Iraqi military was prepared to turn on Saddam once an offensive was launched against him.

The United States accuses the Iraqi president of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorists.

President Bush has said he wants to see a ``regime change'' in Iraq. If covert attempts fail, some expect Bush to try military action.

SARAJEVO , July 13 (Tanjug) - Two days ahead of the start of a tripartite summit of the presidents of Yugoslavia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital woke up to posters showing Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica holding a gun and the slogan "July 15 - terrorism on Bosnia-Herzegovina".

The authors of the poster, which bears a black-and-white photograph of Kostunica taken several years ago in Kosovo, are signed as members of the organization Islam Bosnia - Muslim Brotherhood.

Local prosecutors in Moscow have begun a criminal action against a Russian author who wrote about a fictional homosexual relationship between Stalin and Khrushchev.

Vladimir Sorokin, a surreal novelist who is one of Russia's rising literary stars, is accused of spreading pornography with his novel Blue Bacon Fat.

The charges were brought after a youth group loyal to President Vladimir Putin protested about the book, publicly destroying copies in the centre of Moscow.

Full story here.

BEIJING (Reuters) - The head of China's state-owned television industry is sleeping in his office to prevent hijackers from once again beaming forbidden images of the outlawed Falun Gong movement to televisions around the country.

An engineer at state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), whose channels were among those interrupted, said Minister Xu Guangchun of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) was spending nights at the office.

``The reason he is sleeping in his office is so that he can have instant access if anything unexpected happens and can handle the problem instantly,'' the engineer said.

Between June 23 and 30, hijackers cut into broadcasts of: the World Cup soccer finals, the fifth anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule attended by President Jiang Zemin and news of devastating floods, officials said.

Falun Gong, outlawed in 1999 after an estimated 10,000 followers demonstrated peacefully outside the Communist government's leadership compound in Beijing, has not claimed responsibility for hijacking the satellite broadcasts.

But Beijing blames Falun Gong, which it calls an ``evil-cult,'' for the disruptions and said they were done in retaliation after a after a government campaign sent thousands of its followers to labor camps or jail.

``This is extremely despicable and represents yet another crime committed by Falun Gong,'' senior official Liu Lihua said.

BIG STEP UP

Followers began hacking into local cable TV networks earlier this year to show Falun Gong videos after once frequent demonstrations in Beijing petered out.

Falun Gong spokespeople in New York, where founder Li Hongzhi lives, said those were the work of grassroots followers.

But hacking into national satellite beams is a big step up from cutting into a city-wide cable television network -- especially in a year fraught with change as a Party leadership reshuffle looms and economic reforms threaten millions of jobs.

``Falun Gong obviously is playing a very sophisticated game of sabotage. They know where to hit,'' said a television executive with a foreign company in Beijing.

Experts said the hijackers could not, as one Chinese official told a news conference, have popped into an electronics store and bought the required equipment.

``If all they wanted to do was disrupt the signal, that's relatively trivial,'' said Giovanni Verlini, editor of AsiaPacific Satellite.com magazine, from his base near London. ``But they wanted to hijack the signal. That's not easy at all.''

Experts said the hijackers would have needed access to a multimillion dollar earth station from which signals are beamed to satellites, or a satellite dish at least 30 feet wide.

EXTREME SENSITIVITY

Government sensitivity over Falun Gong was highlighted last week when Beijing stopped transmission of the BBC's World Service Television channel after it showed group members protesting in Hong Kong against Jiang's crackdown on the movement.

According to Hong Kong newspapers, CCTV scrapped live coverage of Jiang's speech and the swearing-in ceremony of Hong Kong's Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa last week in fear that the satellite signal might be hijacked.

The June hijackings were aimed at the Chinese Sinosat-1 satellite, which also serves the national weather bureau and other strategic interests, the official news agency Xinhua said.

Sinosat-1 carries about 46 foreign and Chinese channels, according to the Web site www.sinosat.com. Most foreign channels are allowed to broadcast only to luxury hotels and apartment blocks allowed to house foreigners.

BEIJING (AP) -- China has suspended a transmission of the BBC World TV channel that reaches thousands of foreigners across the country after it objected to a news item dealing with the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, the broadcaster said Thursday.

The satellite service remained suspended Thursday, four days after the item aired, the British Broadcasting Corp. said. Other satellites continued to bring the BBC into China, however.

``We are aware that an item which appeared on BBC World ... has caused some concern to the Chinese authorities,'' a BBC statement said.

The cutoff came after a broadcast on the fifth anniversary of Hong Kong's July 1, 1997, handover from Britain to China -- a news item that included material on Falun Gong, the spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government in 1999.

The channel said it was trying to understand the precise nature of the objection, but assumed it dealt with the Falun Gong. The BBC said China had offered no information on when the service might be reinstated.

In Beijing, the State General Bureau of Radio, Television and Film refused comment, asking for questions to be sent by fax. There was no response to the fax by late Thursday.

The BBC said transmissions were cut off from a satellite known as Chinese Sinosat 1 and affected only viewers in China, including those in 60,000 up-market hotel rooms across the country and apartment blocks where foreigners live. That is the only officially authorized BBC transmission in China.

China's broadcasters, like its other media, are state-controlled and kept on a tight leash. Foreign media are allowed more leeway, but retributions against reporting that irritates the government are not uncommon.

Falun Gong is a particularly thorny issue with the communist leadership in Beijing, which considers it a threat to order and control.

TOKYO (AP) -- A court sentenced a member of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group to 20 years in prison Thursday for her involvement in a series of bomb attacks in the 1970s.

Yukiko Ekita, 51, received the sentence in Tokyo District Court after being found guilty of attempted murder, a court officials said on condition of anonymity.

The Japanese Red Army, formed in the late 1960s, advocated a worldwide Marxist revolution. Its members were responsible for numerous attacks including one in 1972 at the airport in Tel Aviv, Israel that killed 26 people. It is now mostly inactive.

Ekita was deported from Romania after entering the European country on a false Chilean passport. Japanese police arrested Ekita in March of 1995 upon her arrival in Japan.

She was once in Japanese custody but was released in 1977 with five other accused terrorists in exchange for the release of passengers held as hostages in the hijacking of a Japan Airlines jet in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

She was charged with attempted murder and violating Japan's explosives law for her role in a series of bomb attacks on major Japanese companies in the early 1970s.

In one case, eight people were killed and more than 200 injured in a Red Army bomb attack at the head office of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Tokyo in 1974.

Prosecutors had sought a term of life in prison for Ekita. But Presiding Judge Megumi Yamamuro cited her apology to victims during a previous court session for meting out the more lenient term of 20 years, Kyodo News service reported.

To date, five Japanese Red Army members have been convicted of murder and attempted murder charges, including two sentenced to death. Two other members are still at large, according to Japanese news media.

BELGRADE , July 4 (Tanjug) - Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said on Thursday that "there are operative findings and indications that there are plans to destabilise authorities and assassinate politicians, and police found out that one of the targets is DOS whip Cedomir Jovanovic."

Mihajlovic told a news conference that police knew the identity of the centres that planned to destabilise DOS and the Interior Ministry "but saying which centres are in question is not in the interest of our fight."

MOSCOW, Jul 2, 2002 -- (RFE/RL) Russian companies Gazprom, LUKoil, and Yukos are seeking to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the Angolan economy, according to Aleksei Chepa, the head of a Russian-Angolan fund, polit.ru reported on June 28.

Chepa said that the Russian energy giants would like to raise Angola's daily oil output to 1.5 million barrels, as well as invest Russian capital into the country's diamond industry.

Chepa noted that Russian companies await the quick adoption of new Russian legislation that will stimulate investment abroad.

According to a law currently being drafted by the Russian government, the definition "investment abroad" will be replaced with "private investment," thus radically simplifying the process of investing in foreign business.

TAIPEI, Jul 2, 2002 -- (dpa) Taiwan police on Tuesday seized 79 kilograms of heroin, allegedly smuggled from North Korea, and arrested nine smugglers, police said.

Coastal police seized 198 bricks of heroin as the smugglers hauled it from a fishing boat onto a truck on the coast of Keelung, northeast of Taipei.

The heroin had a street value of 200 million New Taiwan dollars (6 million U.S. dollars).

"The suspects said they bought the heroin from a North Korean warship on the high seas, and intended to sell it in Taiwan," police director Wang Chin-wang told a news conference.

The plastic covering on the heroin bricks were marked with the English words "Double Uoglobe Brand" and in Chinese had "Double Lion Brand".

This brand of heroin is believed to be manufactured in the Golden Triangle border area of Thailand, Myanmar (Burma) and Laos.

Most of the heroin Taiwan has seized in the past was Double Uoglobe Brand, police said.

BELGRADE, Jul 1, 2002 -- (dpa) The price of electricity in Serbia on Monday went up by an average of 50 percent for households and nearly 60 percent for industry.

Households consuming small amounts of energy - around half of all users - will pay up to 120 percent more. The bill in that category would grow from roughly 2,000 dinars (31 dollars) to 4,300 dinars annually.

The cost of a kilowatt/hour of electricity now averages 2.91 cents on the average.

Energy Minister Kori Udovicki said the "unpopular but necessary measure" would allow a continuation of the re-haul of the battered Serbian energy network.

The prices changes for electricity was agreed in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), she added.

Serbia has been plagued by winter blackouts due to a combination of poor heating and cheap electricity that spurred millions of people to turn on their electric heaters.

The price of electricity also went up in the neighboring Bulgaria on Monday, by 29.55 percent, also in accordance with an agreement the country has with the IMF.