Balkans

Kosovo is pushing ahead with decentralisation as envisaged by the Ahtisaari plan, but without the support of citizens across the ethnic spectrum the integration of all communities will remain a challenge, said Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci. Decentralization, a byword for allowing Kosovo’s minority Serbs to run their affairs separately …

Albania’s Prime Minister Sali Berisha on Tuesday fired the country’s highest tax official who is currently on trial on charges of torture and murder. Arben Sefgjini, head of the General Directorate of Taxes, previously served as the head of Tirana’s Secret Service Office, SHIK. Three of his former colleagues, Budion …

Macedonia’s two ethnic Albanian parties, the ruling Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, and the opposition Democratic Party of Albanians, DPA, picked their own presidential candidates for the March 22 elections, pushing the total number of presidential hopefulls to ten. DUI picked its vice president Agron Buxhaku as the party’s sole …

Albanian think-tanks that monitor the EU accession process disagree on whether the country’s application for EU candidate status should come during the Czech presidency or later. Greece’s ratification of Albania’s Stabilization and Association Agreement, SAA, with the European Union last week was the final step in the formal approval process …

A surprising agreement by the leaders of Bosnia’s three strongest Serb, Croat and Bosniak parties over a new territorial and constitutional setup has brought more confusion and confrontation to the country’s political landscape. A joint statement by the three leaders – Milorad Dodik from the Bosnian Serb Union of Independent …

Serbia’s foreign minister Vuk Jeremic invited European Union officials to come on a fact-finding mission and see first-hand Belgrade’s efforts on cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Belgrade signed the key Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU last year, but the Netherlands is blocking its …

Khaled El Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin who claims he was kidnapped by the CIA during his stay in Skopje in 2003, filed a second lawsuit against Macedonia on Monday. El Masri says that Macedonian police assisted the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency in kidnapping and transferring him …

Efforts by Tirana to dismiss an Albanian deputy in the assembly of the Council of Europe, CoE, have temporarily frozen Albania’s voting rights and created a political storm at home Albania’s parliament speaker, Jozefina Topalli, asked the CoE in a letter to replace Aleksander Biberaj, currently the deputy head of …

Leaders of Bosnia’s three strongest ethnic parties on Monday agreed on what appears to be a new administrative and territorial setup for the troubled Balkan country. The agreement envisages the country divided in four rather than the current two regions set up at the end of the 1992-95 war between …

he VMRO DPMNE party of Macedonia Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski picked Georgi Ivanov, a political science professor at Skopje University, as its candidate in the March 22 presidential election. Ivanov, a political newcomer but a personal favorite of many senior VMRO officials, captured the overwhelming majority of delegates at the …