Yugoslavia's reformist leaders said yesterday they would withdraw a bill on co-operation with the UN war crimes court after they failed to resolve differences over the measure with their partner in government.
The junior partner, the Montenegrin Socialist People's Party (SNP), said it was sticking by its stance of opposing any law allowing war crimes suspects like ex-president Mr Slobodan Milosevic to be transferred to the tribunal in The Hague.
Serbia's DOS reform alliance, the senior partner in the coalition, needs SNP support to pass the law, which is widely seen as crucial to securing Western funds for Yugoslavia at an international donors' conference next week.
Yugoslavia's reformist Interior Minister, Mr Zoran Zivkovic, said after last-ditch talks with the SNP to try to get it to agree to the extradition provision that the DOS would withdraw the bill but find other ways to co-operate with the tribunal.
Meanwhile, human rights groups in Belgrade have said they believe that the remains of up to 2,000 Kosovan Albanians murdered by special forces in 1999 may have been moved to Serbia during the war.
The interior minister has mentioned a possible figure of 1,000, buried at three sites so far - Batajnica, where exhumations are under way in the presence of forensic scientists from the war crimes tribunal, Petrovo Selo in eastern Serbia, and an unnamed third location which media speculation suggests may be near the river Drina, on the border with Bosnia.
Ethnic Albanians claim 4,000 people are still missing two years after the Kosovo war.