Saving Sarajevo: Rights body to pull out

BELGRADE (Reuter) - The Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe said yesterday it was pulling its human rights monitoring mission out of Serbia over the next two days.

Philipp Hahn, the CSCE's deputy chief of mission, said negotiations to reverse Serbia's decision earlier this month to ask the mission to leave had not been successful.

He said the mission's offices in Kosovo, Sandjak and Vojvodina were already shut. The three areas have Albanian, Muslim and Hungarian majorities respectively.

The decision to expel the CSCE stemmed from the Yugoslav republic's year-long suspension from the international human rights forum.

The head of the mission, Tore Boghe, said its aim had been 'to prevent the horrors of Bosnia spreading to other ethnically sensitive areas'.