NEW REPORT COMPILED ON BOSNIAN ARMS SALES TO IRAQ

SARAJEVO, Jan 6 (Hina) - Authorities in Bosnia's Serb entity have compiled a new report on the illegal sales of arms and military equipment to Iraq, but the document avoids to say who and how in the past couple of years headed this suspicious venture which brought Bosnia-Herzegovina to the brink of U.N. sanctions. #L# The report, on more than 1,600 pages, was presented to journalists in Sarajevo on Saturday by Dragan Cavic, the newly-elected president of the entity -- Republika Srpska (RS). Cavic claimed the entire responsibility lay with former RS President Biljana Plavsic and a group of officers of the former Yugoslav army -- JNA. Cavic admitted for the first time in public that what the U.S. administration has been claiming since last summer was in fact true -- the Bijeljina-based Orao aviation institute maintained the Baghdad regime's air force, thus breaching U.N. Security Council decisions. It was an undercover project conceived and led from Belgrade, specifically the Jugoimport company, said Cavic. "The trade with Iraq was led as a conspiratorial activity in military structures under the banner 'Zora'," he said, adding it had been enabled by decisions Plavsic and Milorad Dodik's 1997-8 RS government made concerning military industry management, which excluded civilian supervision. Cavic vowed the investigation of the issue would be completed soon and all those responsible punished. The news conference, however, did not give even one concrete answer as to what had been going on during the years of the most intensive cooperation with Iraq, when RS was ruled by Cavic's Serb Democratic Party (SDS) and Mladen Ivanic's Party of Democratic Progress (PDP). There was no coherent explanation either of the fact that less than four months ago the SDS and the PDP had drawn up a report claiming there had been no violation of the embargo on arms and military equipment sales to Iraq. Also unexplained was how the Iraqi were able to freely enter RS during the Ivanic government, what they were doing there and why then RS Defence Minister Slobodan Bilic travelled to Mianmar to sell arms despite the international ban. Cavic's murky explanations of the scandal prompted the immediate reaction of former RS Prime Minister Dodik, who labelled the latest SDS-PDP report "the culmination of hypocrisy". "I, like the majority of my ministers, could not enter Yugoslavia at that time," he said, recalling his long-standing animosity with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his regime. For Dodik, the Orao report is merely the continuation of the SDS' showdown with Plavsic as well as an attempt to shift political responsibility to someone else. According to the Dodik government's defence minister, Manojlo Milovanovic, the report is full of errors, such as the wrong names of the principal RS Army officers, and fails to note that the management board of the military industry was headed by notorious SDS hard-liner Velibor Ostojic. Under the RS Constitution, the body known as the Supreme Defence Council has unlimited authority and liability over the management of the entity's military and all other issues concerning the army and defence issues. Between 1998 and 2002 at the helm of the Council was the incumbent chairman of Bosnia-Herzegovina's three-man presidency, Mirko Sarovic, whose deputy was in effect Cavic. The third-ranked in that body was ex-PM Ivanic, currently a candidate for the post of Bosnia's foreign minister. Although the integral Orao report has not been made public yet, their names are not mentioned anywhere, which frees them from the possibility of being held responsible in any way. The report is currently being examined by the international community. All claims made will be thoroughly checked before a decision is made on what steps to take, said Julian Braithwaite, spokesman for the Office of the High Representative. He added the entire process would take several weeks. (hina) ha