Balkans

LONDON, June 23, (Agencies): British security forces will find it impossible to monitor all the estimated 500 jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq after they return home, a former top intelligence official said Monday. Richard Barrett, ex-head of counter-terrorism at the MI6 overseas security agency, told the BBC that authorities …

Kosovo police have launched a probe into the murder of Elvis Pista, a prospective MP from the Democratic Party of Kosovo, who was shot dead in his hometown of Rahovec/Orahovac.

The UN refugee agency called on the authorities to ensure that people who fled Kosovo during the 1998-99 war have places to live and security if they choose to return home.

With the last votes from the general election yet to be counted, the political parties are still squabbling over who has the right to form a new government in Kosovo.

Former military policeman Zeljko Stanarevic was arrested on suspicion of having participating in the killings of Bosniak civilians in the north-western Bihac municipality.

The protest movement that swept Bosnia earlier this year may have faded, but its principal legacy – a new sense of empowerment among the people – will endure.

Dysfunctional governments in Balkan countries continue to drive down democracy ratings in the region, according to Freedom Houses’s latest study, ‘Nations in Transit 2014’.

If Kosovo is serious about its European future, whoever forms the next government faces a big job to improve its justice system and human rights record.

A Bosnian Serb Army officer insisted that Bosniak forces staged an attack that killed over 60 people at Sarajevo’s Markale market in 1994, Ratko Mladic’s war crimes trial was told.

A hundred years on from the start of World War I, the city where it all began is putting on a range of events that send a message of peace after a ‘century of wars’.