Balkans

SOFIA, Bulgaria Pavlin Dimitrov, who has been chief secretary in the Ministry of Interior up to now, will be proposed for deputy interior minister, Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov announced ahead of the meeting of the Council of Ministers.

MACEDONIA Opposition claims that the 2001 Ohrid Peace Accord is a dead letter are unfounded, Macedonia’s Deputy Prime Minister Abdilakim Ademi says. The pact ended that year’s short-lived ethnic Albanian insurgency, promising the country’s largest minority official recognition of its language and culture and positive discrimination in state employment.

A working group will be formed to work out ways to lift ailing steelmaker Kremikovtzi out of the doldrums while protecting to the utmost the interests of the state, workers and bondholders, a government media statement said. The announcement came after Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov met representatives of bondholders …

TIRANA Albanian villagers prevented Council of Europe (CoE) officials from conducting an investigation into the trafficking of human organs, Albanian media reported. Former Hague chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte mentioned in her book published last year that the home of the Katuci family and the village of Rripe in north …

PRIŠTINA The Kosovo Albanian government has passed a decision for the purchase of buildings in Washington, London, Paris and Brussels, to house its embassies. According to a statement released in Priština, the government adopted a request of its foreign ministry to start with buying only four buildings due to a …

BELGRADE The Serb National Council of Kosovo (SNV) official Radmila Trajković has commented on the government’s stance regarding the announced local elections in Kosovo. She said that “local self-government will have no responsibility toward Serbs” if Belgrade called for a boycott of the vote, scheduled for November. “I do not …

BELGRADE Coordinator of the Forum for Ethnic Relations, Dušan Janjić, said that visa liberalization is not possible for residents of Kosovo currently. He added that the reasons for this is that Serbia “has no control over the province”. Commenting on Interior Minister Ivica Dačić’s statement that the government should adopt …

Detainees from Guantanamo Bay might be relocated to Zabela prison in Pozarevac, Serbia, an anonymous source close to the Serbian government told daily Danas on Tuesday. According to the source, Serbia’s embassy in Washington has passed the prisoner transfer proposal to the US government in order to strengthen bilateral relations. …

The US does not support “any kind of partition of Kosovo”, US State Department spokesperson Mark Toner said, in comments carried by Tanjug. “I can tell you that our policy remains unchanged,” local Albanian media in Pristina quoted Toner as saying. He added that the US supports the sovereignty and …

Albania should block Macedonia’s NATO accession if Skopje continues to neglect its large Albanian community, the head of an ethnic Albanian party in Macedonia says. Menduh Thaci, the head of the opposition Democratic Party of Albanians, DPA, told a Monday press conference that he considered asking Albanian Prime Minister Sali …