CROATIA AND YUGOSLAVIA ABIDE BY THEIR STANDS ON PREVLAKA

NEW YORK, April 6 (Hina) - Ahead of another decision which the United Nations Security Council should soon make on the destiny of the UN monitoring mission on the peninsula of Prevlaka, on Wednesday Croatian and Yugoslav governments resumed the exchange of letters with Secretary-General Koffi Annan, without making any step towards the convergence of views. Croatia's Ambassador to the United Nations, Ivan Simonovic, reiterated that his country believes that the future of Prevlaka lies in the normalisation of relations and the civilian usage of areas from both sides of the international border. He said that after 1992 talks of the then presidents of Croatia and Yugoslavia (Serbia/Montenegro), Franjo Tudjman and Dobrica Cosic respectively, a legal framework and mandate was established for negotiations on a permanent solution of the issue of Prevlaka. Delegations should settle the issue of the overall security of Boka Kotorska (the Bay of Kotor, Montenegro) and the Croatian coastal town of Dubrovnik, he added. Croatia believed that a consensual agreement might be assisted by the creation of confidence among residents from both sides of the frontier, and that is why Croatia agreed with Montenegro to open border crossings and enable local civilians move. Belgrade opposed that persistently. Furthermore officials in Belgrade have excluded Montenegrin representatives from their negotiating delegation, and rejected Annan's proposals for allowing limited movement of civilians in the so-called blue zone on Prevlaka. In his letter to the UN Security Council the head of the Yugoslav delegation, Rodoljub Etinski, described Annan's proposal as something contrary to principles of a peaceful settlement to disputed issues. Etinski claimed that since the second half of the 19th century there had been nobody but soldiers on Prevlaka and that local villagers neither cultivated land nor caught fish there. (hina) ms