Forensic experts began searching a ravine in central Bosnia on Thursday for the remains of around 60 Bosnian Muslims and Croats killed by Serb forces early in the 1992-95 war.

The search began hours after the Bosnian war crimes court ordered the exhumations at Mount Vlasic where between 160 and 220 prisoners of war were shot dead on August 21, 1992.

Bosnian Serbs told the prisoners from detention camps for non-Serbs near the town of Prijedor that they would be released in a prisoner exchange but instead drove them away by bus, lined them up by the edge of a ravine and shot them.

Only a dozen survived what has become known as the Koricani Cliffs massacre, by tumbling or jumping down the steep ravine.

The war claimed 100,000 lives.

The killings were part of a wave of ethnic cleansing by rebel Bosnian Serb forces who were trying to create a Serb statelet by removing Bosniaks – Bosnian Muslims – and Croats from the area.

The remote site is believed to be a secondary mass grave, meaning the bodies were removed from the execution site to this location some time later in an attempt to hide the crime, Amor Masovic, the head of a regional Commission for Missing Persons, told Reuters.

Forensic experts have already unearthed skeletal remains from two other secondary mass graves and have established the identities of 117 victims of the massacre whose bodies were mainly incomplete due to removal.

Eleven Bosnian Serb ex-policemen were convicted for the crime at Koricanske Stijene, including Dargo Mrdja who was jailed for 17 years by the Hague-based U.N. war crimes court.

The remainder were convicted by the Bosnian war crimes court.
…

Ramush Haradinaj, a former guerrilla fighter who has twice stood trial for war crimes, was chosen Thursday to form a new government in Kosovo, ending a political deadlock that has persisted since elections on June 11.

President Hashim Thaci gave Haradinaj the mandate after his coalition struck an agreement with a smaller party that paved the way for them to take power.

Haradinaj’s PAN coalition comprises his AAK party and others made up of former guerrillas who fought Serbian forces in 1998 and 1999. That campaign led to accusations of war crimes against him, but he was acquitted twice by a U.N. war crimes tribunal.

The coalition signed an agreement Monday with the smaller New Alliance for Kosovo (AKR) party to put together a new government, an agreement that gives them 62 seats in the 120-seat parliament. The AKR is led by Behgjet Pacolli, whom media call the richest man in Kosovo.

Haradinaj is expected to present his program to parliament on Saturday, after which the government should be elected.

The new government will confront unemployment running at 30 percent and uncertain relations with Kosovo’s neighbors, especially Serbia, a precondition for both countries to move forward in their efforts to join the European Union.

It must also reform health and education and the tax administration system as well as include representatives of 120,000 Kosovo Serbs who do not recognize independence.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, almost a decade after NATO airstrikes drove out Serbian forces that had been accused of expelling and killing ethnic Albanian civilians in a two-year counterinsurgency.
…

Parliament in Spain’s prosperous Catalonia region has approved an independence vote for October 1, which Madrid has vowed to stop.

Separatist parties, which hold a slim majority, backed the referendum legislation and legal framework needed to set up an independent state.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy ordered government lawyers to file a complaint with the country’s constitutional court in hopes of annulling the referendum.

Polls in the northeastern region show support for self-rule waning as Spain’s economy improves. But the majority of Catalans say they do want the opportunity to vote on whether to split from Spain.

The vote will come about three weeks after Barcelona and a nearby town were struck by Islamist attacks that killed 15 people.

‘Act of force’

Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría condemned the Catalan leadership for carrying out “an act of force” and for acting more like “dictatorial regimes than a democracy.”

“What is happening in the Catalan parliament is embarrassing. It’s shameful,” she told reporters.

But Catalan leaders have pledged to proclaim a new republic within 48 hours if the “yes” side wins, regardless of turnout.

Former Catalan President Artur Mas said pushing ahead with the referendum was justified because a pro-independence coalition won the 2015 regional election.

“The referendum is what we have to do because we have the mandate of the peoples of Catalonia,” Mas said.
…

The outgoing U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Tefft, has defended the expulsion of Russian diplomats from seized consular property in the United States amid an increasing strain in diplomatic ties.

In a joint interview Wednesday in Moscow with the Russian services of VOA News and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Tefft rejected statements in Russian media that the seizing of diplomatic property in San Francisco, New York and Washington was done in what Russian President Vladimir Putin called a “boorish and unprecedented” fashion.

Putin accused U.S. authorities of threatening to “break down the entrance door” of the Russian Consulate in San Francisco after Washington set a September 2 deadline for the premises to be evacuated.

“Nobody broke down doors. Nobody put undue pressure on people. It was all done very, very carefully — and, in compliance with the Vienna Conventions,” Tefft said.

Court battle

Speaking in China on Tuesday, Putin said, “Let’s see how well the much-praised American legal system works in practice.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in a telephone call on Wednesday that Russia had initiated legal proceedings for what was a “violation of international law.”

U.S. President Donald Trump reduced Russia’s consular facilities this month after the Kremlin demanded the U.S. cut its diplomatic staff in Russia to 455 people.

Russia said it was imposing the demand as a countermeasure to new U.S. sanctions over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and to achieve “parity” with the level of the Russian diplomatic presence in the U.S. Trump’s closing of the Russian consulate and two annexes brought the number of Russian diplomatic facilities in the U.S. even with the number of U.S. facilities in Russia.

“But when we used parity to withdraw our consent for the Russian government to have a consulate in San Francisco, then everyone got all excited. And, you know, parity is parity,” Tefft noted.

Tefft: Reduction not voluntary

Russia’s Foreign Ministry gave conflicting statements, implying that the U.S. had voluntarily reduced its staff, a notion also rejected outright by Tefft.

However, Tefft said in the interview that it was false to suggest that Washington “negotiated or somehow signed on to the idea of reducing our staff.”

“We were told to do that. That was not something that was negotiated,” he said.

Russian officials say they are considering how to respond to the reduction of their U.S. consular facilities.

Despite the downward spiraling diplomatic relations, Tefft has urged Russia to join U.S. allies in Asia and Western governments in pressuring North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program.

“While the focus, at this point, is on the United States, I noted one of the earlier missiles a few weeks ago, you know, landed 60 kilometers off of Vladivostok in the water,” Tefft said. “This is a regional and now becoming a global threat. It’s not just against the United States, it’s against all of us.

“One of the things that Secretary Tillerson and Foreign Minister Lavrov agreed, when they saw each other here in March, was that the United States and Russia both believed the Korean Peninsula should be non-nuclear.That’s a fundamental which we can work on,” Tefft added.

Regular talks seen continuing

The U.S. ambassador said there had been regular consultations between U.S. and Russian experts on North Korea and that he expected more in the next few weeks.

“Now, getting forward, we’ve got to try to find the best tactics to do this. But we need strong efforts by Russia and China if we’re all going to be successful,” he said.

Tefft is expected to leave Russia this year and be succeeded by Trump appointee Jon Huntsman, a former U.S. ambassador to China.

VOA’s Danila Galperovich contributed to this report.
…

Judges at the European Court of Justice on Wednesday rejected an attempt by Hungary and Slovakia to block mandatory quotas of refugees, which the bloc wants to resettle from Greece and Italy. VOA’s Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
…

Catalan lawmakers were voting Wednesday on a bill that will allow regional authorities to officially call an Oct. 1 referendum on a split from Spain, making concrete a years-long defiance of central authorities, who insist the referendum as illegal.

In an effort to rein in one of the country’s deepest political crises in recent years, Spain’s conservative government threatened to challenge the Catalan parliament’s decision to allow the vote at the country’s top court. The public prosecutor’s office also said it was preparing a lawsuit to punish the Catalan speakers’ committee for disobeying previous court orders and for abusing power.

The plenary session in Barcelona saw tensions flare when the regional parliament’s top speaker, Carme Forcadell, announced that the vote on the bill will go ahead without the customary vetting of a legal committee.

The so-called “referendum bill” was included at the last minute in Wednesday’s agenda. It was likely to be passed by a pro-independence majority later in the day, paving the way for plans for the ballot to be formalized.

The pro-independence coalition ruling Catalonia, where a strong Catalan identity is built around its own language and traditions, says the bill will legitimize a binding vote on breaking away from Spain based on the right to self-determination.

The Spanish government, however, considers that the referendum violates the country’s constitution because only the central authorities can make such a call.

Spain’s constitutional court has previously ruled that any step taken toward a referendum on secession would be illegal. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Wednesday urged the court to take punitive measures against the Catalan legislative body’s committee of speakers, including Forcadell.

Wednesday’s parliamentary session was an “embarrassing show” and “a kick to democracy, to Catalans and to political decency,” said Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria.

Rajoy has vowed to use all legal measures at hand to ensure the vote doesn’t take place and has ordered his cabinet to be ready to challenge the constitutionality of the bill if it ends up being passed.

“We are defending the rule of law in Spain and democracy in Catalonia,” his deputy, Saenz de Santamaria, said in a televised press conference that was hastily convened.

The Spanish government is trying to strike a delicate balance between offsetting the secessionist defiance and staying away from more dramatic measures that would further inflame anti-Spanish sentiments, such as suspending Catalonia’s autonomous powers or declaring a state of emergency that would bring the army into the mix.

The vote is also not recognized by most of the political opposition at the national level. The leaders of the Socialists and the business-friendly Ciudadanos party declared support for the conservative government in fighting the vote.

Home to 7.5 million, the prosperous Catalonia region centered on Barcelona generates a fifth of Spain’s gross domestic product and enjoys ample self-government, running its own police and with considerable powers in health and education. But key areas such as taxes, foreign affairs and most infrastructures are in the hands of the Spanish government.

The pro-independence block has argued that full control would benefit Catalonia, an idea that grew in support in times of high unemployment and harsh austerity measures as a result of Spain’s 2008-2013 financial crisis. The return to solid growth has weakened public backing for independence, although polls show that almost eight out of 10 Catalans want to have the right to vote.

But a referendum in defiance of Spain’s rule of law, without the blessing of central authorities, has inflamed controversy. If the vote takes place and there is a victory for the “yes” side, Catalan leaders have pledged to proclaim a new republic within 48 hours, regardless of turnout.

Former Catalan leader Artur Mas said that pushing ahead with the referendum was justified because a pro-independence coalition won the 2015 regional election. “The referendum is what we have to do because we have the mandate of the peoples of Catalonia,” he said.

Mas is the highest-ranking among Catalan politicians suspended from office and fined by the country’s Supreme Court for organizing a non-binding vote on independence in 2014. The “yes” vote to breaking away from Spain won at the time amid a low turnout by voters.
…