Eurasia

The trial of former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic resumed for 2013 with testimony about the exhumation of war crimes victims from mass graves.Davor Strinovic, a Croatian medical expert who was part of a commission tasked with finding missing people, said he helped to exhume bodies at the Ovcara farm …

Bosnia’s regional prosecutors have made a prompt start to the year by pressing ahead with three new war crimes cases.After a review of the remaining war crimes cases in Bosnia and Herzegovina was carried out last year, all of the less complex cases – some 600 of them – were …

UK Independence Party says it will campaign hard against lifting restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians working in Britain in 2014.The leader of Britain’s rightwing UK Independence Party, which has seen a recent surge in support in the polls, says it would be “irresponsible” to open British borders to Bulgarians and …

After Balkan Insight lifted the lid on top Albanian officials who had not paid their car registration taxes, the Minister of Transport, Sokol Olldashi, has apologized.“Minister Olldashi publicly apologizes for not paying the taxes for his vehicle, which his wife uses,” his office said in a statement. “This fact is …

Ceremonies to mark Orthodox Christmas at churches and monasteries in Kosovo were shadowed by detentions and protests.Kosovo police arrested nine people in the town of Gracanica on Monday for what they said were “security reasons” amid a visit by a Serbian official. The director of the Serbian government’s office for …

Prime Minister Sali Berisha said Serbia’s threat to remove a memorial to ethnic Albanian fighters in the Presevo Valley breaks international law.“In every free country it’s the local authorities and not the central government that decides which historical or cultural monuments to erect,” Berisha said in a statement on Sunday. …

Two former officials accused of collaborating with Communist-era Yugoslavia’s secret police have had their names cleared.The administrative court in Skopje overturned a preliminary ruling by Macedonia’s Lustration Committee that former ambassador to Poland, Petre Nakjovski, and former state security service official Hetem Ejup Ademi had been secret police collaborators during …

A Sarajevo court upheld the jailing of a Bosnian Serb army officer over the 1995 Srebrenica killings but cut his sentence.The appeals chamber of the Bosnian state court endorsed the conviction of Slavko Peric, a former assistant commander, but reduced his prison sentence from 19 to 11 years. It also …

Majority of young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina would leave the country at the first opportunity for a better education and the chance of a job.Most young people in Bosnia would leave the country for good if they could, because they do not see any kind of future for themselves, …

Kosovo’s President has expressed readiness to meet her Serbian counterpart – in the context of a meeting between ‘presidents of two sovereign and independent states’.Arber Vllahiu, President Atifete Jahjaga’s spokesperson, told Balkan Insight that the two leaders would meet “as presidents of sovereign and independent states” to support the EU-led …