Bosnia and Albania are in the visa-free EU Schengen zone starting mid-December. Germany rued the day it dispensed with the Deutsch Mark and embraced the EU when Greece collapsed and had to be revived via mouth-to-bank. Now the EU is letting two of the most impoverished, unstable, organize-crime-riddled countries in its neighborhood in to play. ( Read more... )

The killings in Visegrad were so frequent and so numerous that the management of the hydroelectric plant across the border in Serbia appealed in 1992 over the radio for whoever in Bosnia was responsible to stop throwing bodies into the lake because they were clogging up the dam's culverts.
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The Netherlands has withdrawn its opposition to Serbia's bid for membership in the European Union. The Dutch government, whose troops handed 8,000 Bosniak men and boys over to the Bosnian Serbs who slaughtered them in Srebrenica, had previously blocked Serbia's overtures to the EU as long the remaining two war crimes fugitives, Ratko Mladić and ( Read more... )

Or something ( Read more... )

Bosnia and Herzegovina has slipped further in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) scale. It was revealed at the CPI presentation held in Sarajevo on 17 November, that Bosnia and Herzegovina had ranked a score of 3.0 - a score shared by countries between 99th to 105th position - in an index that covers 180 countries. The ( Read more... )

In this quick Reuters piece about the 12-year prison sentence handed down by a Belgrade court to Ilija Jurišić for 1992 war crimes, the offense is described as "improper battlefield conduct by ordering an attack on a column of the Yugoslav Peoples' Army (JNA) on May 15, 1992 in the town of Tuzla ( Read more... )

Midnight on July 18th 1996 was warm and sultry in Belgrade. While the city had largely retired on this Thursday, the lights were burning bright in the hustle and bustle of the Serbian Presidency in the heart of Belgrade. Several men stood or sat in the library, haggard, with their ties loosened and their sleeves rolled up. Staffers quietly ( Read more... )

On the eve of the tenth birthday of one of the Clinton Administration's more costly gaffes, it's amazing to see how much things have changed -- and not changed -- since then.


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Their full report will be published in June, but the media brief posted to their website yesterday pulls no punches. While they spare no vitriol for Serb aggressors, they level equal criticism at Albanian terrorists.The lack of prosecutions of ethnic Albanians for the abductions of Serbs and Roma has been attributed to a lack of impartiality by ( Read more... )

13 former soldiers have been convicted, this time by a Serbian court, of war crimes for the Ovčara Massacre of Croatian POWs during the 1991 Battle of Vukovar. Somehow, despite such huge strides toward righting recent wrongs, European human rights watchdogs are still grousing about Serbia "accepting and telling the truth about the conflict in the ( Read more... )