Balkans

At a time when the West desperately needs to coordinate its policy towards Bosnia, Berlin’s unilateral push to appoint a new international overseer for the country is a troubling development. Berlin wants to replace Bosnia and Herzegovina’s long-serving High Representative Valentin Inzko – responsible for monitoring implementation of the 1995 …

Razed or ‘restored’ with little regard for their original form, Ottoman-era mosques in a mainly Muslim pocket of Serbia face extinction. In mid-December, a group of men, some of them armed, set up a roadblock at a construction site in the southern Serbian town of Novi Pazar, where an Islamic …

Many migrants and refugees on the road to Western Europe have serious health problems – but for those staying outside official camps, especially, accessing proper treatment can be difficult.

Can Montenegro succeed where its Balkan peers failed in conducting a fair process of lustration? Not likely, say analysts and experts. Montenegro’s new coalition government is promising a law on lustration to weed out public officials guilty of past human rights violations, but political analysts and legal experts say it …

The fight against the spread of fake news is becoming more sophisticated in North Macedonia – but those involved in disseminating misinformation are upping their game as well. The day starts with coffee and unread messages: a few from friends, a few work related, a paid furniture ad, and one …

After a 12-year gap caused by an ethnically-driven political dispute, municipal elections were finally held in the divided city of Mostar, but they failed to deliver the expected shift away from the main Bosniak and Croat ethnic parties.

Parents of the youthful protesters arrested during the latest anti-government rallies are hunting in police stations across Tirana for their children – some accusing the police of making arbitrary arrests. Emin Basha, uncle of Ibrahim Basha, a police officer killed on duty while fighting drug lords in southern Albania four …

It was June 13, 1999, and Uli Reinhardt, a photojournalist from the German news magazine Stern was due to meet his colleague Gabriel Gruener at 6pm in the southern Kosovo city of Prizren.

Turkey has long pursued a policy of soft-power diplomacy in the Balkans. More recently, the defence sector has come to the fore. When, in the midst of a reignited war over the Caucasus mountain region of Nagorno-Karabakh, President Aleksandar Vucic said Serbia was considering buying Turkish armed drones, it was …

President Hashim Thaci set in motion the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Kosovo – but after he was charged with war crimes, it’s unclear whether any other political leader has the will to push the idea forward.