LOCAL PRESS

Drecun: Pristina slows down the implementation of the agreement (Tanjug, 08/08/2014)

The President of the Board for Kosovo and Metohija, Milovan Drecun said today that there are many questions to be opened in the proces of normalization of relations, but that the intention of Pristina to slow down the process of implementation of the first Brussels agreement, which specifically refers to the union of Serbian municipalities, is obvious.
“The key question is when an executive authority in Pristina will be formed, and until that happens, we will not have a cooperator on the other side who will be ready to continue the process of normalization of relations,” Drecun said at the TV Pink morning program.
Drecun said that the biggest problem is that the European Union itself has not defined the criteria, nor is it known how the right questions about Kosovo and Metohija, under the Brussels agreement will be asked when it comes to screening and chapter 35.

The President of the Board for Kosovo and Metohija said that the most important thing is creation of a Union of Serbian municipalities and opening of the chapters that are relevant for people’s lives.
These are the questions of property, position of the Serbian Orthodox Church, return of refugees and overcoming the deadlock in the prosecution of those who committed crimes against Serbs and other non-Albanians, Drecun said.

The President of the Board for Kosovo and Metohija, estimated that the measure of substantial progress would be if direct talks between Belgrade and Pristina would be successfully realized.
He noted that the report of the Chief Prosecutor of the EU Special Investigation Team on KLA crimes, Clint Williamson, is some progress, however, quite selective and it shows that there has been a political interference.

Drecun added, he fears that the report is inconsistent with the report of the Council of Europe Rapporteur for the Convention on trafficking in human organs in Kosovo, Dick Marty, who opened the issue of war crimes, including the biggest illegal trafficking of organs, while in Williamson’s report “a humiliation caused by the number of these victims is unacceptable”.

Serbia “not equipped” to take part in new Cold War (Beta, Nedeljnik, 8 August 2014)

FM and First Deputy PM Ivica Dačić says “Serbia does not want to participate in any war, even in a cold one, because it is neither equipped nor capable.”

In an op-ed published in the weekly Nedeljnik, he wrote that Serbia’s commitment to peace and dialogue had opened the door to the European Union and allowed the start of accession talks.

“Of course we will, because the EU is our priority not only politically, but also essentially over the years that are ahead of us, every day be closer to what is called the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU,” said Dačić.
He said that Serbia “supports the territorial integrity of any state, and Ukraine, therefore, with Crimea”.
“There is not and will not be any dispute in Serbia over that stance. As there is no dispute about our European road. But in all this we are very aware that about the most important issues – we do not decide. For that reason we have no dilemma, for example, about South Stream. It will happen if Russia and the EU so decide and agree, and not if Serbia rejects or accepts it. After all, Serbia is the only non-EU member, besides Russia itself, on the South Stream (pipeline’s) route.”
Dačić wrote that “anyone who deals at least a little bit with geopolitics and relationships in the world knows very well that some kind of ‘peace’ between the big powers cannot be, because there are too many interests, too much money, oil, gas, weapons.. to allow the big great powers to see each other in any other way except as eternally opposed opponents.”
Dačić added that “of course, much has changed since the ‘official’ Cold War” and that things are now done “in a more stealthy and sophisticated manner, from the intent to the realization.”
“Unchanged is only one thing – the same rules do not apply to the big opponents and to other mortals,” wrote Dačić.
Serbia, he said, “learned the hard way that the rules for it and them are by no means the same.”
“For our mistakes, for our wrong ambition, and for our crimes (and we recognized that there were), we paid, and we pay today, a serious price. Those great powers, they do not have to worry about that part. There are no courts for them,” said Dačić.
He further pointed out that Serbia is “not equipped or capable for a cold war,” and then asserted that the country “has long been accustomed to be definitely guilty in every war and for every war, regardless on whose side it fought and how it fared in the end.”
“Even now, a hundred years after the First World War, in which we officially were among the winners, one of the favorite topics in the world is – Serb guilt for the outbreak of the war. So, since we are guilty for these wars, because in them we perish and lose, and never win anything – it is clear why we today do not wish to take part in this never-interrupted war. Serbia will not be a new Gavrilo Princip of some new world order,” wrote Dačić.

Dacic: Around 20 ambassadors to be appointed by end of 2014 (Tanjug, 08.08.2014)

The new heads of around 20 Serbian diplomatic missions abroad will be appointed in the next four months, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, who is also foreign minister, has announced.
“After a review of the overall situation, I have established that around 20 new ambassadors and consuls-general need to be appointed by the end of the year, rather than ten,” Dacic told the Danas daily when asked why the July deadline for appointing ambassadors to vacant positions in ten countries was missed.
The process has been initiated and “four new ambassadors have been appointed,” Dacic said, but declined to name the diplomats who are awaiting agréments.

Imposing sanctions on Russia would cost Serbia EUR 1 billion (Tanjug, 08.08.2014)

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said Friday that Serbia could not impose sanctions on Russia because it would lose at least EUR 1 billion.
Introducing sanctions against Russia would ruin business for fruit growers, vegetable and dairy farmers, and Serbia would lose at least EUR 1 billion, Vucic told reporters in the town of Ub near Belgrade, where he attended the beginning of the works on the future Belgrade–Bar motorway section through Serbia.
He pointed out that the damage would be immense if Russia would respond to sanctions by increasing the price of gas.
“The fact that we have not imposed sanctions on Russia means that we are pursuing a responsible state policy,” the Serbian prime minister said, stressing once again that Serbia respects the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
“I think we have pursued a good, serious and responsible policy, and the results are yet to be seen,” said Vucic.

REGIONAL PRESS

Montenegro to be affected by Russian sanctions, (Tanjug, 7 August 2014)

Montenegro, which previously joined EU sanctions against Russia, is now among the countries targeted by Russian counter measures.

On Wednesday, Russia declared a one-year ban on import of some agricultural products from those states that imposed sanctions against it, or joined those measures.

Montenegro’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration said on Thursday that it “regretted the decision of the Russian Federation,” and that it “ordered” the Russian embassy in Podgorica to inform them in more detail about the “special measures” defined in President Vladimir Putin’s decree.
The ministry also said that “harmonizing with EU positions” was the country’s foreign policy priority, and that sanctions which Montenegro introduced against Russia “at no point had an anti-Russian character,” but rather came out of respect for the principles and values the country stands for in international relations.
The ministry further said it believed Russian authorities and citizens “understand Montenegro’s stance and position,” and that the Russian measures will “in no way influence the good and friendly relations between the two countries, nor jeopardize in any serious manner the continuation and development of bilateral ties and cooperation.”
The import ban is effective immediately and Russian authorities are tasked with determining the concrete list of products.

Croatian food exporters faced with Russian “nyet”(B92, 08.08.2014)

A decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week in response to western sanctions has also hit seven Croatian companies.

The decree bans, for one year, import of food products from countries that have imposed economic sanctions against Russian companies or individuals, or have joined such sanctions.

In Croatia, the companies that are affected sold beef, pork, fish, fruit, vegetables, and dairy to the Russian market, the Croatian website Tportal reported.
The list includes Cromaris, Ostrea, Podravka, PIK Vrbovec, Vindija, and Belje.

INTERNATIONAL PRESS

Washington’s Alliance With Traffickers of Human Organs And the cover-up in the West (Antiwar.com by Justin Raimondo, August 06, 2014)

Remember the Kosovo war? If you’re under 30, it’s just a blip on the historical screen, one that has far less impact on your consciousness than the subsequent wars of the post-9/11 era – and yet it was an important milestone on the road to where we are today. It was in Kosovo that the complicity of government and media in ginning up a new era of wars really began to take on dimensions we have all grown quite used to.

Back then, CNN was the entirety of the cable news universe, and Christiane Amanpour – married to State Department spokesman James Rubin – became the head cheerleader for dragging us into that conflict. Railing about alleged atrocities by the Serbs against the supposedly pacific Kosovars, Amanpour’s role as media warmonger-in-chief was complemented by the union of neocons and Clintonian “progressives” who demanded American military intervention in the name of “humanitarianism.”

It was in Kosovo that the “responsibility to protect” doctrine – later run up the flagpole during the Libyan intervention – was first rolled out: it was our moral duty, we were told, to go to war against Serbia. The evil Serbs were the villains. The Kosovars were the Good Guys. As a report by Dick Marty, of the Council of Europe investigative team looking into war crimes committed by the Kosovo “Liberation” Army (KLA), put it in his 2010 report:

“The appalling crimes committed by Serbian forces, which stirred up very strong feelings worldwide, gave rise to a mood reflected as well in the attitude of certain international agencies, according to which it was invariably one side that were regarded as the perpetrators of crimes and the other side as the victims, thus necessarily innocent. The reality is less clear-cut and more complex.”

The Serbs-guilty-Kosovars-innocent narrative pushed by the interventionists has stuck to this day, in spite of the ongoing victimization of the remaining Serbs – who have been ethnically cleansed from most of the region, after witnessing their homes and churches burned to the ground while the “allies” – who still occupy Kosovo – stood by and watched. As it turned out, NATO did more than merely stand by and watch – according to Marty they actively covered up numerous war crimes committed by the KLA and the current leadership of Kosovo, including the practice of trafficking in human organs torn from the bodies of Serb prisoners of war.

Clint Williamson of the EU Special Investigative Task Force has told reporters:

“Certain elements of the KLA intentionally targeted the minority populations with acts of persecution that included unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”

The special investigative task force was set up in response to Marty’s 2010 report, which said there was compelling evidence indicating KLA leaders had engaged in the trafficking of human organs obtained from prisoners of war. These allegations have been on the back burner since 2008, when former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal, Carla del Ponte, wrote about them in her book, The Hunt, originally published in Italian. Here is a short excerpt:

“The prosecutors office received information which UNMIK officials had received from a team of trustworthy journalists that during the summer months of 1999 Kosovan Albanians had transported 300 kidnapped people from Kosovo to Albania.

“These prisoners were initially held in sheds and other structures in Kukes and Tropoje. According to the journalists’ sources, who were only identified as Kosovo Albanians, some of the younger and fitter prisoners were visited by doctors and were never hit. They were transferred to other detention camps in Burrel and the neighbouring area, one of which was a barracks behind a yellow house 20 km behind the town.

“One room inside this yellow house, the journalists said, was kitted out as a makeshift operating theatre, and it was here that surgeons transplanted the organs of prisoners. These organs, according to the sources, were then sent to Rinas airport, Tirana, to be sent to surgical clinics abroad to be transplanted to paying patients.

“One of the informers had personally carried out a shipment to the airport.

“The victims, deprived of a kidney, were then locked up again, inside the barracks, until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. In this way, the other prisoners in the barracks were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified to be killed immediately.

“Among the prisoners who were taken to these barracks were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia and other Slavic countries. Two of the sources said that they helped to bury the corpses of the dead around the yellow house and in a neighboring cemetery.

“According to the sources, the organ smuggling was carried out with the knowledge and active involvement of middle and high ranking involvement from the KLA.

There’s much more, including a history of KLA officials murdering their political opponents as well as alleged “collaborators” with the Serbs, systematic extortion, kidnapping, drug-dealing, and other crimes. None of which is too surprising to those of us who were writing about Kosovo during the war: I did a piece on the organ trafficking allegations in 2010. But those of us who knew the true nature of the KLA as a gangster organization were steadfastly ignored. Indeed, Ms. del Ponte was viciously attacked by John Hudson, a staff writer at Foreign Policy magazine, who declared the former prosecutor was “over her skis.” It looks like Hudson is the one over his skis, or perhaps over his head when it comes to discerning truth from the conventional wisdom as dispensed around the State Department water cooler.

After NATO’s glorious “victory,” allied troops – primarily American soldiers – continued to occupy Kosovo, supposedly in order to keep the two sides from slitting each others’ throats. In reality, however, as Marty points out in his 2010 report, the NATO overseers turned a blind eye toward the crimes of the KLA:

“Although some concrete evidence of such trafficking already existed at the beginning of the decade, the international authorities in charge of the region did not consider it necessary to conduct a detailed examination of these circumstances, or did so incompletely and superficially.

“The international organizations in place in Kosovo favoured a pragmatic political approach, taking the view that they needed to promote short-term stability at any price, thereby sacrificing some important principles of justice. For a long time little was done to follow-up evidence implicating KLA members in crimes against the Serbian population and against certain Albanian Kosovars.”

This is not to deny the atrocities committed during the war by the other side, although I would venture to say accounts of alleged Serbian war crimes were vastly overstated for propaganda purposes. However, as Marty puts it:

“What emerged in parallel was a climate and a tendency according to which led to all these events and acts were viewed through a lens that depicted everything as rather too clear-cut: on one side the Serbs, who were seen as the evil oppressors, and on the other side the Kosovar Albanians, who were seen as the innocent victims. In the horror and perpetration of crimes there can be no principle of compensation. The basic essence of justice demands that everyone be treated in the same way.”

Ignoring this basic principle of justice is the modus operandi of American foreign policy: when the Israelis commit aggression, they are only acting in “self-defense” – and we send them weapons with which to carry out what are clearly war crimes. When our Ukrainian sock-puppets bomb rebel cities from the air, inflicting horrific casualties on civilians, our response is to denounce “Russian aggression” – and give Kiev the means to kill more.

The Kosovo war has special meaning for me, and for this web site: Antiwar.com, in its present form, was essentially founded as a response to US intervention in the region. Our first supporters, financial and otherwise, were Serbian-Americans who were isolated by the war propaganda being beamed over the airwaves 24/7 and were grateful for our merciless devotion to separating truth from official mythology. I will always remember their steadfast support.

Back in those days – the late 1990s – my online column was entitled “Allied Farce: A Wartime Diary,” a daily debunking of the lies and half-truths of the government-media complex. These pieces sometimes exceeded 5,000 words: yes, it often took that many words to untangle the threads of deception in which our government and their enablers in the media wrapped the facts.

Now, all these years later, the truth is finally coming out. This affords me minimal satisfaction, at best. It is sad indeed to note that it took that long for the facts to overtake the “narrative” – and that the families of the numerous victims of Kosovar savagery will probably never see true justice done. It sickens me to think that top US officials, including especially then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, shamelessly canoodled with the very KLA chieftains, such as Hacim Thaci, directly implicated in this gruesome organ-trafficking operation.

Which leads us to an interesting conclusion. If we look at the regimes US intervention has birthed in the post-Soviet era, they are one and all de facto dictatorships whose appalling crimes Washington has willfully looked away from. Kosovo – where a gangster state, the crime capital of Europe, sells the organs of its human victims: Iraq – a brutal theocracy where the Western concept of “human rights” is completely absent: Afghanistan – which boasts the most corrupt “government” on earth, its venality surpassed only by its weakness in the face of a Taliban onslaught. Not to mention Libya – which is fast taking the place of Somalia as a byword for utter chaos, and where our Ambassador was brutally murdered by those he had “liberated.”

What these more recent cases have in common with Kosovo is the “humanitarian” rationale for intervention. In Kosovo, we were lectured on a daily basis by the Christiane Amanpours of this world that every moment we hesitated to intervene was a moral crime. In Iraq the neocons endlessly repeated the mantra that Saddam had “murdered his own people” and we therefore had a right and indeed a duty to invade. In Afghanistan, the rationale was more complicated but the sheer length of this war necessitated something more than a narrative of revenge and again the “humanitarian” angle was exploited: we weren’t invading a sovereign nation, we were “liberating” Afghan women by building schools. When it came Libya’s turn to bear the brunt of our humanitarian concern, the “responsibility to protect” theory of international relations so beloved by Samantha Power and her fellow “progressive” armchair warriors was applied: unless we turned NATO’s guns on Qaddafi, just as we had aimed them at Slobodan Milosevic, a “humanitarian catastrophe” was foretold at Benghazi. Of course, we did experience a catastrophe at Benghazi, albeit not quite the one Ms. Power had in mind.

This is why “humanitarianism” in foreign affairs is the biggest danger to peace and justice on earth: it unsheathes a sword that would otherwise go unstained and it valorizes the wicked in pursuit of a seamless and marketable war narrative.

The present leadership of Kosovo consists of a cabal of war criminals whose disgusting crimes surpass all human understanding. They should be hauled to the Hague forthwith, and I would call for the death penalty in this case. Human kidneys and other organs as the spoils of war? Death is too mild a fate for Thaci: his own kidney should be detached from his body and stuffed down Madeleine Albright’s lying throat.

Oh, and by the way: we still have US troops in Kosovo – indeed, last year we sent combat troops there, as this writer points out, for the first time in a decade. Why? Because the gangsters we put in charge are acting with all the brutality one might expect of the Albanian branch of the Mafia and the region is on the brink of yet another outbreak of violence. In the context of Washington’s new cold war against Russia, a re-eruption of the Kosovo war may well be a feature – not a bug – of the much-anticipated Clinton Restoration. And remember, it was Hillary who hectored a hesitant Bill into finally giving the order to bomb Belgrade, according to her admiring biographer. Like Albright, her fellow Democratic hawk, Hillary too had occasion to find herself in the arms of an organ-trafficker – apparently enjoying every second of it.

Bill Clinton’s Most Abominable Freedom Fighters Uncloaked (counterpunch.org by James Bovard, August 07, 2014)

Former president Bill Clinton continues to pirouette around the world as a visionary humanitarian and senior statesman. But the sordid truth about some of his favorite “freedom fighters” is finally becoming undeniable.  A European Union task force last week confirmed  that the ruthless cabal he empowered by bombing Serbia in 1999 has committed atrocities including murdering individuals to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts.

Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”

A special war crimes tribunal is planned for next year.  But the New York Times reported that the trials may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling:  “Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses’ fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA. are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA. occupy high posts in the government.”  American politicians have almost entirely ignored the growing scandal.  Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as “the George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body trafficking operation.

The latest allegations might cause some Americans to rethink their approval of the 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia that killed up to 1500 civilians. In early June 1999, the Washington Post reported that “some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo  in  Churchillian  tones, as  Clinton’s ‘finest hour.’” Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because the Serbs were allegedly committing genocide in Kosovo.  After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain’s Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.

Kosovo was wracked by a civil war in which both the Serbs and their opponents committed atrocities.  The KLA’s savage nature was well-known before the Clinton administration formally christened them “freedom fighters” in 1999. The prior year, the State Department condemned “terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.”  The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. But arming the KLA helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial.    Clinton was aided by many congressmen anxious to portray U.S. bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joseph Lieberman whooped that the U.S. and the KLA “stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.”

After the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the U.S. and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only “with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.”  In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches, and oppressing any non-Muslims as well as ethnic Albanians who did not support the KLA. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.

In 2009, Clinton visited Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, for the unveiling of an 11-foot tall statue of himself.  The allegations of the KLA’s involvement in organ trafficking were already swirling but Clinton made no mention of the grisly record of his hosts.  Instead, he stood on Bill Clinton Boulevard and lapped up adulation from supporters of one of the most brutal regimes in Europe. A commentator in the U.K. Guardian noted that the statue showed Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.” Regardless of the persecution that followed the bombing, the authorizing documents for the aggressive war were presumed to be as holy as the stone tablet with the Ten Commandments that Moses purportedly received.

Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine -“whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing regardless of whether their accusations against foreigners are true.  As long as the U.S. government promises great benefits from bombing abroad, presidents can usually attack who they please.

Clinton’s war on Serbia was a Pandora’s Box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq and for the Obama administration to bomb Libya.  Both interventions sowed chaos from which continues to curse the purported beneficiaries.

The bombing of Serbia also revealed prior to 9/11 that the American media would uncritically parrot the U.S. government’s war propaganda.  In the mainstream media, no one did more to oppose and denounce the war than the late Counterpunch co-founder Alexander Cockburn.  In his columns in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, he debunked one justification after another for attacking a foreign nation that posed no threat to America. And, in pieces sometimes co-authored by Jeffrey St. Clair, he revealed how the war had utterly failed to achieve Clinton’s lofty-sounding goals.  Cockburn also pointed out that “Hillary Rodham Clinton was an enthusiastic advocate for the cluster bombs that now litter the Serbia and Kosovo landscapes, set to kill or cripple for the next half century.”  (A roundup of articles by Cockburn and St. Clair on the Serbian war can be found in the 2004 book,  Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.)

Unfortunately, Bill Clinton will never be held liable for killing innocent Serbs or for helping body-snatchers take over a nation the size of Connecticut. Clinton is reportedly being paid up to $500,000 for each speech he gives nowadays. Perhaps some of the well-heeled attendees could flourish artificial arms and legs in the air to showcase Clinton’s actual legacy. And at least the KLA’s defenders can still praise the terrorist group for not being cannibals.

Serbia producers get big chance as Russia orders retaliatory sanctions (ITAR-TASS News Agency, August 07, 2014)
Russia’s response to Western sanctions opens “vast prospects” for exports from Serbia, which has not joined sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, the president of the Serbian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said on Thursday.
“The Russian market is open for supplies, first of all plums and other agricultural products, as well as dairy products and confectionery,” Zelijko Sertic said, adding that the Chamber had already sent inquiries to all municipalities to make up the list of companies that could supply products to the Russian market.
He warned possible exporters that the Russian market “differs a lot at present from the way it used to be. The Russian market is more complex nowadays, demands are more concrete and high, while control of inspection services is much stricter than before,” he said.
Sertic said last year 768 Serbian companies were exporting their products to Russia, and all of them have received instructions on demands of Russian sanitary control agencies to vegetables and fruit.
He said Russia’s retaliatory sanctions against the West were offering vast possibilities to Serbia’s agricultural sector, as “it is obvious that Russia will need imports of new products in place of earlier imports”.
Apart from dried plum, he also mentioned exports of meat and meat products, the quotas on which were not exhausted. “The development of livestock breeding is one of priority directions in Serbia, as well as the growing of such cultures as plums, which used to be Serbia’s strong point,” Sertic said. He added, however, that plum crop this year was insufficient even for the production of domestic rakia (fruit vodka).
“The Russian market is also open for all dairy products, cheese based on vegetable fats, confectionery, a wide range of agricultural products and food, but conditions for us are the same as for all the others,” he said.
President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday signed a decree on countermeasures to Western sanctions, which prohibits or restricts, for one year, the import of certain kinds of agricultural products, raw materials and food originating in a country that has imposed economic sanctions against Russian companies and (or) individuals or has joined such sanctions.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced on Thursday that the Russian government imposed a one-year ban on imports of beef, pork, poultry, fish, cheeses, fruit, vegetables and dairy products from Australia, Canada, the European Union, the United States and Norway.
The list of the banned products includes cattle meat (fresh, chilled and refrigerated), pork (fresh, chilled and refrigerated), poultry meat and all poultry edible by-products, salted meat, pickled meat, dried meat, smoked meat, fish and shell fish, clams and other water invertebrates, milk and dairy products, vegetables, edible roots and tuber crops, fruits and nuts, sausage and analogous meat products, meat by-products or blood, as well as products made of them, ready-to-eat products including cheeses and cottage-cheese based on vegetable fats.

Bosnian Fighters Indicted for Brcko Prisoner Abuse (BIRN, 07 August 2014)

Former Croatian Defence Council fighters Redzep Salaj and Mensur Peljto are accused of crimes against Bosnian Serb civilians and prisoners of war in the Brcko area in 1992.

The Brcko District elementary court on Thursday charged the two former members of the 108th Brigade of the Croatian Defence Council with committing a series of crimes including torture in May and June 1992.

The Brcko prosecution accuses Salaj of physically abusing a civilian, alongside two unknown soldiers, in a building near the ambulance station in Brcko, and later taking him away and killing him.

Both Salaj and Peljto were charged meanwhile with torturing and inhumanely treating prisoners of war and civilians detained at the Majevica forestry building in Okrajci near Brcko.

Both men will give their pleas to the charges in the next month.

Bosnian Citizens Get Training to Spot Election Abuses (BIRN by Elvira M. Jukic, 8 August 2014)
A campaign is urging ordinary people in Bosnia and Herzegovina to get engaged in monitoring the upcoming general elections and spot possible misuses on their own.

A campaign has been launched for ordinary people in Bosnia to exercise their right to get involved in overseeing the conduct of elections, ahead of the next general election due on October 12.
Sabina Ortes, 35, from Livno in west Herzegovina, told Balkan Insight that she had joined the campaign in the hope that the elections will be more transparent as a result.
“I was involved earlier in some international monitoring teams and every time I hope it can get better,” she said. “It’s curiosity that motivated me to apply to monitor the elections as a citizen.”
The initiative – the work of a coalition of several non-governmental organizations – is called Under the Magnifying Glass.
“There are always the same mistakes,” Ortes said. “For example, an old or an illiterate persons comes and someone in charge of such cases uses the opportunity to cross his or hers own political options [on the ballot paper],” she added.
The hope was that greater civic involvement in the polls, alongside the work the election commissions and different political parties, would be fruitful, she continued.
“Every time before that I reported a misuse I thought it would come to the consciousness of the people – but now I think it will be more effective, following the protests and the awakening of the people,” she said, referring to the street protests that shook the country earlier this year.
Widespread protests erupted over large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina in February. Rallies against poverty, corruption and unemployment started in the northern town of Tuzla on February 5.
The protests then spread and turned violent, after which official buildings were torched or attacked in Tuzla, Zenica, Mostar and Sarajevo.
Under the Magnifying Glass said that several hundred interested citizens had asked for training on how to monitor the elections in only a few days.
“We expect several thousand non-party monitors to be engaged on election day,” Asim Beslija, of the coalition, said.

“During the election period, we need to pay attention to the use public resources for promotion of political parties and their programs,” he added.
Beslija said special attention should be paid to strict implementation of the election law so that all procedures on polls and with the ballots are transparent.
A total of 65 parties, 24 independent candidates and 24 coalitions are eligible to run in the elections. Bosnia’s Central Election Commission has said that the elections will cost an estimated 4.6 million euro.

Refusal to Probe Police Minister Angers Macedonia Opposition (BIRN by Sinisa Jakov Marusic, 05 Aug 14 )

The opposition has accused the Chief Prosecutor of turning a blind eye to corruption, after his office said claims that the Police Minister received cash donations on behalf of her VMRO DPMNE party will not be probed.

Macedonia’s opposition Social Democratic Party, SDSM, has accused Chief Prosecutor Marko Zvrlevski of deliberately choosing a national holiday to let slip that the Police Minister will be not investigated for corruption.

The announcement emerged over the August 2 holiday of St Elijah,  Ilinden in Macedonian, when Macedonia celebrates one of its biggest national vacations.
In May, the SDSM filed corruption charges against Police Minister Gordana Jankuloska on two criminal accounts of misuse of office and of tax evasion.

The SDSM says she illegally accepted a cash donation of €80,000 for her party, VMRO DPMNE, in 2006.
The prosecution said there was no evidence of a crime because in 2006, when the alleged crime took place, she was the party secretary general and thus not in charge of financial transactions.
“In order for a criminal act, misuse in office,  to exist…  the culprit has to be an official who has the authorization within the legal subject, the political party VMRO DPMNE, trusted to him by law or regulation… Jankuloska at that time, for this particular act, did not have that legal status,” the prosecution office said.

It also refused to further investigate a second allegation of tax evasion because it said “there is no evidence that money was received and illegally retained” by Jankuloska and thus charges of evasion in paying taxes were irrelevant.
The opposition insists that the prosecution was influenced by the ruling party and failed to examine all the presented evidence.
“Is any official in any party allowed to take €80,000 in cash? In a speedy procedure Zvrlevski discards our evidence in the form of cash receipt with a VMRO DPMNE stamp and a signature on it, without an examination that could have confirmed for sure whether it is Jankuloska’s signature and without examining the witness,” Damjan Mancevski, the SDSM vice president, said.
In the April general and presidential elections, which the ruling party won by a landslide, the SDSM came out with a series of accusations about high-level corruption.
Among others, the SDSM produced what it said were cash receipts containing the stamp of the ruling party and Jankulovska’s signature. They said the cash was donated by Zagorec Tumbovski, a local businessman who has been convicted of financial crime.
Tumbovski later told the media the claims were true. He told Libertas news portal that the ruling party had extorted money from him and that Jankuloska had been in charge of taking his donations.
VMRO DPMNE has denied the claims, saying the evidence was fabricated, and the credibility of the businessman who was offered as witness was compromised.
In July, Chief Prosecutor Zvrlevski refused to start a corruption investigation against the Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski as well.
The opposition produced documents and a telephone recording that it claimed featured the Prime Minister agreeing to the sale of Makedonska Banka AD to Serbian businessman Jovica Stefanovic, aka ‘Gazda Nini’ (‘Nini the Boss’) in 2004, for a bribe of 1.5 million euro.
Zvrlevski then wrote that there were “no legal grounds for opening an investigation” against Gruevski, because more than ten years had passed since the case was reported, which makes the accusations out of date under criminal law.
Gruevski robustly denied the accusations and is meanwhile suing the SDSM leader, Zoran Zaev, for the sum of 500,000 euro for slander.