Balkans

SKOPJE (Reuters) – Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski has agreed with the main ethnic Albanian party to form a coalition government to aim at getting its NATO and European Union bids back on track, his party said on Saturday.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbia’s Socialist Party has broken off coalition talks with the nationalist bloc and is starting negotiations with the pro-European alliance led by the Democratic Party, officials said on Saturday.

PRISTINA (Reuters) – The United Nations is expected to name Italian diplomat Lamberto Zannier this week as the new head of its Kosovo mission, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday. Zannier takes over from German diplomat Joachim Ruecker as part of a planned “reconfiguration” of the mission after Kosovo …

PRISTINA (Reuters) – Kosovo’s first constitution as an independent state came into force on Sunday, giving ethnic Albanians the right to executive powers held by the United Nations mission that has run the territory since 1999.

PRISTINA (Reuters) – U.N. authorities in Kosovo expect instructions within days on how to proceed after June 15, when Albanians hope to receive a raft of new powers under their first state constitution, a U.N. spokesman said on Wednesday. U.N. veto holder Russia is blocking the transfer of powers from …

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – An agency set up to identify the dead of the Yugoslav wars is now sharing its missing persons expertise with nations including Lebanon, Colombia and Iraq. “Effectively, we have the biggest human identification laboratory in the world,” Kathryne Bomberger, the head of the Sarajevo-based International Commission for …

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnian police have arrested a Bosnian Serb policeman suspected of taking part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, the office of the war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday.

SKOPJE (Reuters) – Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski scored an overwhelming election victory on Sunday but the violence that marred the poll may perpetuate divisions and delay the country’s progress towards European Union membership. Gruevski’s conservative VMRO-DPMNE party will have the healthiest majority in parliament in more than a decade, …

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – A man shot and killed six people in a village near the northern Bosnian town of Tuzla on Thursday, gunning down three in their homes and three aboard a bus, police and witnesses at the scene said.

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Serbia denied it was guilty of genocide during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia on Monday, opening its defense before the U.N.’s highest court against Croatian allegations of ethnic cleansing.