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UNHCR presses Belgrade to release Muslim refugees

SARAJEVO: U.N. relief officials said on Friday they were pressing Yugoslav authorities to release 13 Bosnian Muslim refugees detained as they tried to return to neighbouring Bosnia.

Officials with the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) have strongly protested the detention of the 13 people from Zepa who were prevented by police in Serbian-led rump Yugoslavia from boarding buses to Bosnia this week.

"We are putting a lot of pressure on them and we are hoping they will released sometime today. But we still have nothing concrete yet," said a UNHCR official who asked not to be named.

Nasa Borba, an independent Serbian newspaper, quoted an unidentified UNHCR spokesman as saying the agency would send a plane to Belgrade on Friday in hopes of flying out the 13.

The refugees were among several hundred Muslims who fled to the Yugoslav republic of Serbia from Zepa in eastern Bosnia after the separatist Bosnian Serb army overran the enclave, which had been a U.N. "safe area".

The refugees were put in a guarded camp near the Serbian town of Uzice and were not allowed to leave it.

On Tuesday, Yugoslav authorities allowed 211 refugees to leave in buses back to Bosnia but detained 13 people at the last minute on allegations of war crimes.

The UNHCR said the action violated the terms of the Dayton peace accord, which allows refugees the right to return to their homes, and a post-war agreement on arrests related to war crimes suspects.

Balkan leaders had agreed in Rome to allow the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague to review any arrest warrants for alleged war criminals. -Reuter