Overview of the week's top stories
since 15 February 2003

Slovenia joined with the world in staging demonstrations and marches against the threat of war in Iraq. More than 2000 turned out in Ljubljana, while a crowd of about 500 participated in Maribor.

Protests took place in most large cities across the region. According to Primorski dnevnik, 1500 people turned out in Trieste (Trst). One of the largest demonstrations world-wide took place in Rome, where estimates vary from one to four million.

About 20,000 turned out in Vienna, while a similar crowd participated in Budapest. Prague saw about 1000 demonstrators, while crowds were in the hundreds in Bratislava.

Both Belgrade and Skopje saw crowds in the hundreds, while Zagreb’s demonstration attracted roughly 10,000. Around Croatia, 1000 turned out in Pula and Dubrovnik, 500 in Split and Rijeka, 300 in Osijek and Šibenik, 200 in Zadar, 100 in Vukovar, Ivanec and Knin.

About 500 turned out in Sarajevo, while a group of 100 Muslims and Croats joined forces to protest in the still-divided city of Mostar. The Associated Press reported that this was "the first such cross-community action in seven years in a place where ethnic divisions remain tense despite a 1995 peace agreement."

Late Tuesday night, Slovene authorities took Kosovo Albanian Fatimir Limai into custody in Kranjska Gora. Limai was wanted for alleged war crimes committed in Kosovo during the late 1990s conflict there. This is the first time Slovenia has turned over a suspect to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague.

Limai, a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), currently serves as a member of parliament in Kosovo. He is one of the first four ethnic Albanians to be indicted by the tribunal. The other three were taken into custody on Monday in Kosovo.

All four are accused of illegally detaining, torturing and murdering 22 Serb and Albanian civilians at a KLA prison camp from May to July 1998.

Limai was detained at the suggestion of the Tribunal’s lead prosecutor Carla del Ponte, on the basis of various treaties. He was then transferred to the regional court in Kranj, which confirmed his identity and informed him of the charges he is facing.

Though the international press has reported that Limai was immediately sent to the Hague, he is actually being detained in Kranj. An extradition request came on Thursday, and it is expected he will be transferred to the Hague next week.

"These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position," Chirac told CNN.

Prime Minister Anton Rop, however, criticized Chirac’s comments, saying that they were not "in the spirit of democracy, which reigns among EU members and candidates." He added that "the statement reflects the degree of tension among EU members, who have labored to reach a joint compromise position on the Iraq crisis".

Rop joined leaders of the other candidate states at a briefing on Iraq in Brussels on Tuesday intended to inform EU candidate countries of the decisions made at Monday’s emergency EU summit on the Iraq crisis. Candidate leaders were not invited to the summit. Though the UK and Spain supported their participation, France and Germany objected.

On 5 Friday, Rupel aligned Slovenia with the Vilnius Group of ten Central and Eastern European states, which issued a declaration supporting US policies towards Iraq. Rupel insists that he made the move in consultation with the president and prime minister, and that the declaration is in line with the government’s official position on the Iraq crisis.

At the request of the SMS and the Slovene Nationalist Party (SNS), a meeting of the parliamentary Committee on Foreign Relations was held on Thursday to discuss Rupel and the Vilnius Declaration. The Committee supported Rupel with a vote of 15 against 2 with one abstention. The SMS was not satisfied, however.

On Monday, the SMS plans to call on Prime Minister Anton Rop to fire Rupel; if Rop does not, the party will begin collecting the signatures required to initiate interpellation hearings.

According to the Constitution, a group of no less than ten members of parliament can initiate interpellation hearings against the government or an individual minister. The hearings are followed by a vote of confidence; if the government or minister fails the vote, they must be removed from office. A majority of 46 members of parliament would have to vote no-confidence in order for the action to pass.

On Wednesday at 2:00 pm, 25 radio stations across Slovenia went silent for fifteen seconds to show solidarity with Slovene minority station Radio Dva in Klagenfurt (Celovec), Austria. The Bluebird Society of Maribor organized the action.

Meanwhile, the parliamentary commission for relations with Slovenes abroad discussed the Radio Dva affair on Thursday and decided to send a delegation to Vienna as soon as the new Austrian government is formed.

Last week, a delegation from Radio Dva met with representatives of Council of Europe and European Union institutions in Strasbourg. There, General Secretary of the Council of Europe Walter Schwimmer expressed his support, and promised to bring up the issue at his upcoming meeting with Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and General Director of Austrian national radio and television service ORF Monica Linder.

The Slovene delegation also met with members of the European Parliament’s working group on minority issues, as well as with the European Commissar for Culture. The working group promised to send a letter to the Austrian government in support of Radio Dva.

A 2001 broadcasting law requires ORF to provide services for Austria’s minorities in their own languages. However, ORF backed out of Radio Dva on 1 January 2003, citing financial difficulties. Since then, the station’s five permanent employees and roughly 25 freelancers have been working without pay. Radio Dva premiered in 1998 and provides twelve hours of Slovene-language programming each day.

In Ljubljana on Tuesday, Croatian Minister for European Integration Neven Mimica gave a preview of his country’s plans for European Union membership candidacy. Croatia was not to formally submit its application until Friday, but the early Ljubljana presentation was done in order to secure support for Croatian EU membership within Slovenia.

Croatia wanted to submit its application last April, but opted to wait for the conclusion of negotiations between the EU and the first wave candidates. Public support in Croatia for EU membership is high, between 75 and 78 percent.

Mimica believes that Croatia’s accession negotiations will proceed quicker than those of the countries involved in the first round of expansion. The European Commission is expected to render its evaluation on Croatia’s membership in mid-2004; accession negotiations could conclude by the end of that year. Optimistic predictions see Croatia entering the EU at the end of 2006, together with Romania and Bulgaria in the second round of expansion.

• On Tuesday, the government adopted the Freedom of Information bill and sent it to the National Assembly for its third and final review. If passed, the law would give access to non-sensitive government-related information to all citizens. Although article 39 of the constitution gives all citizens the right to non-sensitive information, the procedures for gaining access to it were to be decided by a later law. The Ombudsman for Human Rights has drawn attention to the fact that the constitutional right could not be executed in practice for several years, and urged the passage of appropriate legislation.

• On Sunday, Karmen Stavec won the right to represent Slovenia at the Eurovision contest on 24 May in Riga, Latvia. Her song, Lep poletni dan (Beautiful Summer Day) won the most votes from the jury as well as from viewers voting via telephone. Stavec drew 26,714 telephone votes, beating out Nuša Derenda and Alenka Godec. Sixteen performers participated in the contest. Last year’s national Eurovision contest erupted in a major scandal when a trio of drag queens, Sestre, won. The numerous irregularities in the voting added to the problems. Stavec came in second place, after Sestre who went on to place 14^th at the pan-European contest held in Tallinn, Estonia.