Balkans

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’.

A witness told the trial of ex-fighter Nikola Maric, accused of the detention, persecution and killing of Bosniaks in the Prozor area, that he saw the defendant shoot a fellow prisoner.

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’.

Five former Bosnian Serb policemen were given reduced sentences of 20 years each for aiding genocide in Srebrenica following a retrial after their previous convictions were annulled.

Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and his main rival, Ramush Haradinaj, remain in deadock over who has the right to form a new government following inconclusive general elections.

The bodies were exhumed after the recent floods that devastated the country washed up bones suspected to be those of Bosniaks killed during the 1992-95 war near Doboj.

Protesters rallied in front of the cathedral in Zagreb against Catholic bishops’ alleged ‘glorification’ of the homecoming of recently-released Bosnian Croat war criminal Dario Kordic.

A man was arrested for he allegedly stabbing an anonymous protected witness in the trial of former Bosnian Serb fighter Dragan Sekaric, who is accused of a series of wartime atrocities.