The prime minister of the Bosnian Serb entity, the Srpska Republic, announced his resignation Friday a day after a clampdown announced by high representative Paddy Ashdown. "Having in mind my personal political convictions and standings, and especially because of moral norms and responsibility towards the fate of the Serb people, the Srpska Republic and its citizens, I resign," Dragan Mikerevic told reporters in Banja Luka, the capital of the enclave. Ashdown, the international community's high representative to Bosnia, had introduced a number of measures against Bosnian Serb authorities accused of helping indicted war criminals evade justice. Recent reports had shown that, instead going after war crimes indictees, the Bosnian Serb Army had employed leading suspect General Ratko Mladic until 2002. Ashdown had acted against 10 low-ranking Bosnian Serb officials and introduced eight measures to "address systematic weaknesses of the security institutions" of the Srpska Republic. Ashdown's measures came after NATO denied Bosnia access to its Partnership for Peace Programme owing to the authorities' lack of cooperation with the United Nations war crimes tribunal, based in The Hague. ---SP 2215 Local Time 1915 GMT
