Lawmakers Reportedly Oust Head of Ethnic Serbian Enclave
The last key opponent of a U.N. plan to deploy thousands of peacekeepers to war-torn Croatia was ousted from power Sunday, news reports said.
The Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said legislators in the ethnic Serbian enclave of Krajina in southwestern Croatia fired Krajina President Milan Babic in a special session. The assembly also dissolved the Krajina government, Tanjug said.
Babic could not be reached for comment.
But Lazar Macura, the region’s self-styled information minister, said in a telephone interview that the action was “illegal.”
“All this is a game manipulated from Belgrade (the Serbian republic’s capital), which never wanted creation of Krajina in the first place,” said Macura, a Babic associate.
Tanjug said 74 deputies voted for Babic’s dismissal, eight were opposed and three abstained.
The removal of Babic from office would clear the last obstacle to the U.N. plan, which aims to enforce a truce in a civil war in which more than 10,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands uprooted from their homes.
Babic objects to the plan because it treats Krajina as part of Croatia and calls for the withdrawal of the Serb-dominated federal army.
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