Plavsic: Bid for power

Bosnian Serb President Launches New Party

At an inauguration ceremony in her Banja Luka stronghold, Mrs Plavsic said the goal was not, as she put it, a 100 percent ethnically pure Bosnian Serb Republic, promising a new beginning.

The formation of her party, the Serb National Alliance, after she dissolved the Bosnian Serb parliament and called for early elections in October. The party will challenge hardline backers of the indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic in the elections.

Serb nationalist songs mark the the launch of Plavsic's party

"Anyone who is ready to adopt the values of a country, respect its laws and institutions and defend it if need be is welcome here," said Mrs Plavsic, who is locked in a bitter power struggle with Mr Karadzic and his ruling SDS party.

Ethnic differences were one of the main issues in the Bosnian civil war in which thousands of people were killed or uprooted from their homes.

Mrs Plavsic used her speech to renewed her attack on Mr Karadzic and his party on the issue of corruption. "We must open our markets towards the world markets," said. "We must do this willingly, not as a reaction to the general hatred of the international community towards Serbs who continue with black marketeering which brings profit and riches to a narrow circle of people in the corrupt leadership of the SDS."

The SDS, which won 52 percent of the parliament seats last year, has challenged the constitutionality of her dissolving parliament. But the party, whose stronghold is in the town of Pale, near Sarajevo, has been plagued by defections, including many loyalists who have gone over to Plavsic.

Elsewhere in Bosnia, S-FOR tanks retreated from a village near the north-eastern town of Bijeljina, after they were pelted with stones by Bosnian Serbs who had taken over the local police station.