Balkans

Close to half of Slovenians, some 47.5 percent, do not want to see their neighbour and fellow ex-Yugoslav Croatia join the European Union, according to a Median poll published in the Croatian weekly Globus. According to the telephone poll conducted from January 8 to 12 on a sample of 712 …

The United Nations mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, lied to Serbia when it was quizzed over an investigation into alleged trafficking of organs taken from ethnic Serbs during the Kosovo conflict, a spokesman for Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor said. Former U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte wrote in her memoirs, …

The European Parliament adopted a resolution calling all European Union member states to recognize July 11, the date of the start of the1995 Srebrenica massacre, as “a day of commemoration throughout the EU”. On July 11 1995, Bosnian Serb forces led by Ratko Mladic killed more than 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian …

A second day of protests by Bulgarian university students, environmental activists, farmers and pensioners ended peacefully outside the parliament building on Thursday, a day after demonstrators clashed with police and 158 people were detained. The January 15 protest, advertised by organisers as an outlet to express discontent at the way …

Panama has officially recognized Kosovo as an independent state, Kosovo’s ministry of foreign affairs said on Friday. This makes Panama the 54th country to recognize Kosovo, whose Albanian majority seceded from Serbia on February 17 last year. The United States and most European Union countries have already recognised it. Panama’s …

Greece’s ratification of Albania’s Stabilization and Association Agreement, SAA, with the European Union on Wednesday was the final step in the formal approval process of the key document by all EU member states, paving the way for Tirana’s application for EU candidate status. Prime Minister Sali Berisha said last week …

Skopje has officially protested at the European Commission in Brussels over comments by the Greek Culture Minister that Macedonia will soon dissolve and be carved up between a ‘Greater Albania’ and a ‘Greater Bulgaria’. Macedonia’s mission in Brussels condemned the statements by Antonis Samaras as “counterproductive” for bilateral relations, and …

The violence in Kosovo’s Serb-populated north earlier this month was not explicitly political but linked to crime, said the chief of the European Union’s police and justice mission in Kosovo. Most of the120,000 Serbs who live in Kosovo among two million Albanians reject the territory’s declaration of independence from Serbia. …

The 2008 Freedom House report classifies newly-independent Kosovo as a “not free” country, while Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro as well as European Union-candidate Macedonia are only “partly free”. Freedom House is a United States-based international NGO that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom and human rights. Its annual survey …

Serbia said it will import gas from Hungary and Germany until Jan 20, and hopes to raise the amount by 2 million cubic metres to cover its needs until the row between Russia and Ukraine is resolved. The country’s energy ministry said Serbia had sufficient crude oil to keep the …