Balkans

Albania’s Socialists accused the ruling Democrats of planning to rig the June 23 polls while the governing party claimed the opposition was trying to spark another crisis.As the political environment heated up ahead of the parliamentary elections, Socialist Party leader Edi Rama said the government was planning to rig the …

The World Bosniak Forum has asked the UN secretary general to commemorate the wartime massacres by declaring July 11 International Srebrenica Genocide Remembrance Day.The United Nations should officially mark the worst killings of the Bosnian conflict, said Mustafa Ceric, president of the World Bosniak Forum, in a letter sent to …

Bulgarians voted in favour of building a new nuclear power station but the referendum failed to achieve a high enough turnout to make it valid.The country’s first referendum of the post-communist era is expected to be declared invalid after a mere 21 per cent of eligible voters turned out on …

Union members rallied in front of the Montenegrin parliament on Monday against government plans to raise income tax to tackle a growing budget deficit.The unions said the plan to bring in higher taxes in order to help plug the hole in Montenegro’s budget was unfair to the poor and called …

Police have detained six men for causing a minor explosion in the main square of the Croatian capital, but said their motive was not political.The capital’s police commander Goran Burusic told a press conference on Sunday that the accused “agreed in December last year that they would detonate an explosive …

Local authorities in Tuzla in north-east Bosnia are to cancel a law which forces solar energy generators to pay them to use the sun as a power source.Tuzla’s cantonal government said this week that it would scrap the legislation, which decreed that people using solar panels to generate electricity for …

The spree in erecting giant monuments in Skopje continues as Macedonian authorities lay grounds for a new 30-metre-high statue dedicated to the Nobel Prize-winning nun.The statue of the late nun, who was born in Skopje to an ethnic Albanian family but spent most of her life in India, is to …

Serbs who suffered in the 1990s conflicts sent a letter to the Hague Tribunal saying recent verdicts acquitting Croatian and Kosovo officials of war crimes were politically biased.“The verdicts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [ICTY] in the cases against Gotovina, Markac and Haradinaj made the idea …

Kosovo’s plan to set up a fund for the Serb-run north financed out of customs duties collected on the border has run into strong opposition from Serbia.Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, has announced that the government will set up a special fund within the state budget for the Serb-run north, …

The Serbian government has set up a commission to investigate the unsolved murders of reporters.The Serbian government set up a commission on Thursday to assess the state of investigations into the killings of journalists in Serbia. The initiator of the move, Veran Matic, editor-in-chief of the broadcaster B92, believes that …