BOSNIA: Lord Ashdown, the international community's administrator for Bosnia, sacked the Croatian member of the country's tripartite presidency yesterday after he refused to resign amid allegations of serious corruption.
Dragan Covic was accused this month along with six other Bosnian Croats of customs evasion, wide-ranging corruption and abuse of office while serving as Bosnia's finance minister and deputy prime minister between 2000 and 2003.
Mr Covic protested his innocence, but Lord Ashdown insisted he must go to preserve the Bosnian administration's tenuous credibility with US and EU officials who have urged him to step down over the allegations.
"With deep regret I have, after a great deal of thought, reached a decision," Lord Ashdown said in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
"I decided to require Dragan Covic to step down from his position in the presidency with immediate effect."
The former leader of Britain's Liberal Democrats, who has run Bosnia since 2002, admitted that Mr Covic had not made a bad president, but insisted that his dismissal was "about the rule of law," and that his remaining in power would impede the future of the country.
Mr Covic vowed to remain in office last week and ride out the scandal and reacted angrily to his sacking yesterday, suggesting he would be glad to see the back of Lord Ashdown when he eventually steps down.
"Those who made this decision and fabricated this process will eventually end their mission," he said, after becoming the third member of the Bosnian presidency to be forced out since the Office of the High Representative was established to oversee implementation of the Dayton peace accords that ended the country's 1992-95 war.
The presidency comprises a Bosnian Serb, a Muslim and a Croat representative.
Since 1998 some 150 Bosnian officials - most of them Serbs - have been sacked or forced to resign, many for obstructing attempts to catch fugitive war crimes suspects.
Reuters adds: A Bosnian Serb former police chief charged with complicity in genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre will surrender to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Bosnian authorities said yesterday.
Bosnian Serb president Dragan Cavic told reporters in Banja Luka, the capital of Bosnia's Serb Republic, that Ljubomir Borovcanin had decided to surrender to Serbian authorities in Belgrade.
"This is a voluntary decision by Mr Borovcanin," Mr Cavic said.
"I do not have all the information but I can say that his transfer will happen in the next few days." He will be the sixth suspect to surrender this month.
