LOCAL PRESS

 

Kosovo – Jihadist Base (Politika)

For years, the Kosovo provincial authorities have been closing their eyes in the face of claims that the province of Kosovo is the biggest hot spot of jihad in the Balkans, as well as a location from which, since 1999 until the present day, young people are recruited every day for the “holy war” or jihad in the Middle Eastern countries of Syria and Iraq. By arresting “peripheral” people in Kosovo, the attention is diverted from the ‘central characters,’ even though Kosovo’s provincial leaders – from the Premier to the Interior Minister – know where the jihad recruitment centers are located and who stands behind them. Politika was told this by Fatmir Sheholi, political analyst from Pristina, stressing that, due to political points, the “existing setup, with Thaqi at the helm, has, allegedly, started dealing with Islamic extremism.” For 15 years, politicians, religious leaders, but also representatives of various NGOs, under the mask of humanitarian organizations, have been propagating radical Islam and calling on youths to engage in “the holy war” as Mujahedin (Islamic ‘Crusaders’). Those particularly standing out, in their speeches, are the “humanitarians” from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who recruit, very presumptuously, and in all manners, young men from the poorest parts of the society, where those from rural regions are in the lead. The story going around certain circles is that young men, aged 19 to 24 years, receive monthly wages from six to nine thousand euros for warfare in Iraq and Syria. However, not only men are being recruited, but also women who are walking dressed in long skirts and coats, with veils revealing only their eyes. The fact that increasingly more Kosovo Wahhabis, are walking freely, while the province’s security structures are doing nothing to put an end to this religious fanaticism, is also an indicator that this unique epidemic is gaining greater momentum – Sheholi tells Politika, noting that “the new mujahedin, whom ordinary citizens avoid, have been especially increasing their momentum over the past several years”. According to Sheholi, at least 140 young men were killed so far in Syria and Iraq, and many of them were “seduced with the promise” that they would return with lots of money after several months of warfare. Sheholi believes that an end can be put to this religious fanaticism, if Kosovo “unites with countries in the region”, but with the help of the EU and US. “We are expecting soon the arrival of 350 U.S. marines, so I believe the Kosovo security services will manage to ‘erode’ the nest of jihadists with the help of U.S. soldiers,” notes Sheholi. Politika wasn’t able to receive a comment from the Kosovo Police or Interior Ministry, to the allegations that it is “an open secret that Kosovo is on its way of becoming a recruiting center of radical Islamic extremists”, and Kosovo’s provincial Interior Minister, Bajram Rexhepi, hung up the telephone when Politika posed this question. In one of the previous operations by the Kosovo police, around 40 people were arrested. They are suspected of being in direct connection with Kosovo Albanian Islamic extremist Lavdrim Muhaxheri, who was seen decapitating a prisoner of war on a video clip posted on social networks. However, information surfaced that Muhaxheri was killed on the Syrian battlefield soon after an international arrest warrant was issued for him.

 

Fule requests opening of chapters (Novosti)
In its annual report, which will be officially presented by outgoing EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule on 8 October, the European Commission (EC) will most probably recommend to EU leaders to give a green light for opening the first negotiating chapters, Novosti learns. The latest version of the document is yet to be finalized, but the general assessment will be positive, and it will underline significant or moderate progress in most fields related to the EU integration process. In the part regarding the normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina, it will state that there had been no high-level political meetings since March, but that significant progress had been made over the past two weeks in the technical dialogue, regarding integrated management of crossings, freedom of movement and distribution of electric energy in the north of the province.

DSS: Agreement on movement recognizes independence (Beta)

The provincial board of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) has assessed that the Brussels agreement on unconditional movement through Serbia of people with documents of the “self-declared state of Kosovo” represents a great paradox and new indirect recognition of Kosovo’s independence. “The agreement is not status neutral and is another proof on indirect recognition of independent state of Kosovo by the official authorities in Belgrade,” reads the DSS statement, adding that the agreement was “reached in silence and with the wish to hide it from the Serbian public”. The DSS assessed that the paradox is that Serbian citizens in the southern province do not have freedom of movement, while citizens of the self-declared republic of Kosovo with separatist documents can freely move from Horgos to Dragas. The DSS reminds the public in Serbia that residents of Kosovo and Metohija, except the residents in the north and only in northern Kosovo and Metohija, with documents of the state of Serbia cannot move in the southern Serbian province. The statement further states that any person, stopped by the Kosovo police south of the Ibar River, with vehicles and documents of the state of Serbia is prosecuted with rigorous penalties from vehicle confiscation to three months in prison”.

 

New “Insider”: What happened to the money for the endangered in Kosovo? (TVB92)

TVB92 began broadcasting the series on the continuation of the Patriotic robbery in Kosovo. Two years after the first series, hundreds of thousands of euros a day continue to leave with an excuse that the endangered population in Kosovo is being helped this way, but, as Insider reveals, the money is still not reaching those for whom it is intended. The new series reveals that part of the money intended for the Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija was ending up as “donation” on the account of the company whose shareholders are Nebojsa Covic, the then head of the Coordinating Center, and his wife Vesna. Investigating further abuse, Insider revealed, which was aired in last night’s series, that the money was going around the circle of the same people: Nebojsa Covic, his secretary Andjelka Radenkovic, who was signing documents, Dragan Kalaba, former head of the Kosovska Mitrovica District, Drasko Pasic, former director of the Komgrap-gradnja Company, Idriz Sijak, former owner and director of the Daki Company, and Bojan Radovanovic, former owner and director of the Masters Company. Since August, all of them have been under investigation by the Special Prosecutor’s Office. Intermediary companies from Kosovo were signing contracts on donations with the Roto Kos Company, whose shareholders were Covic’s associates. With the example of the purchase of the first real estate, a house worth 1.1 million euros, Insider’s journalists prove that the owner of the intermediary Daki Company Idriz Sijak paid the Roto Kos Company 260,000 euros as a donation. Unlike the first series, this time Nebojsa Covic refused to speak for Insider.

 

REGIONAL PRESS

 

East Sarajevo Mayor’s Office: Cross on Zlatiste is part of an election campaign (Fena/Dnevni avaz)

The city of East Sarajevo, in the Serb Republic of Bosnia-Hecegovina (B&H), has not received any requests for the construction of any building, or cross, on Zlatiste hill, so the City institutions are not officially informed about these activities, said East Sarajevo Mayor’s Office representative Igor Goljanin. He stressed that “all activities related to the issuance of permits for construction are the exclusive responsibility of municipalities and the mentioned location is in the jurisdiction of the Municipality of East Sarajevo. “On the other hand, we believe that it is irresponsible and insulting to set up two pipes, that are tied together with wire, and have it symbolize a religious monument. Of course, we agree that we should mention all of the victims of 1992-1995 war in the RS, but this is not the way to do it, since this is a purely political and electoral move of the RS’ ruling party SNSD,” said Goljanin. Former B&H Security Minister Fahrudin Radoncic strongly condemned this as a provocation and abuse of religion for electoral purposes. “It is obvious that SNSD leader Milorad Dodik, in the absence of economic results, just like some of his (Bosniak Muslim) buddies from Sarajevo, seeks salvation from election defeat by attempting to politicize religion,” stated Radoncic. “Creating fear among the citizens and increasing ethnic tensions as well as anxieties are among the scenarios that we’ve already seen in B&H and which are being repeated at the time of every election. Citizens should know that the power that Dodik, Izetbegovic and Lagumdzija hold is, internally, very complex. The recent joint dismissal of the Security Minister Fahrudin Radoncic is a proof of that. Now they are spreading fear and yet, in a post-election period, they will join forces to fulfill their goals, while allegedly being concerned for their people and religion. The illegal act of placing a cross on the hill should be sanctioned by legal means” said Radoncic.

 

Dodik at a rally in Bijeljina: I’m creating conditions for referendum (Oslobodjenje/Fena)

The candidate of the pre-electoral coalition SNSD-DNS-SP for re-election to the post of the President of Republika Srpska (RS), incumbent Milorad Dodik, has stated that he is creating the right conditions for a referendum, because it has to be a dignified act, and not a decision that will cause any inconvenience, because he is not a war leader”, reports Fena. During a rally campaign in Bjeljina, when addressing the audience, Dodik said that he knows that the citizens of the RS, just like him, “don’t believe in B&H and know that it is definitely departing from the scene.”

“I believe in the RS, and you believe me. I know what I’m doing. We will return our Entity-level jurisdictions that have been snatched from the RS,” said Dodik. He also stated that neighboring Serbia is “in a more difficult situation than the RS” and that “after meeting the Russian President Vladimir Putin, our meeting was the top news story of the first program of the Russian television.”

 

Vukovar, bilingual signs removed (Vecernji list)

Members of the Headquarters for Defense of Croat Vukovar removed all bilingual signs in the city after the wreath-laying ceremony at the Memorial Cemetery to mark the constitution of the 204^th Vukovar Brigade and offenders were brought in for questioning at the local police station.
Five individuals were placed under arrest, including one woman, the Zagreb daily Vecernji list reported. According to the daily, two individuals first smashed the sign placed on the police station building and were immediately arrested, after which all other signs in Cyrillic and Latin scripts previously mounted in Vukovar were removed. The head of coordination of defender associations of the city of Vukovar Franja Soljic said that apart from the sign smashed on the police station, all other single bilingual signs in the city have been removed. The defenders removed all other signs and took them to the office of the mayor so that he may return them to Zagreb. Two individuals were arrested, one of whom is a disabled war veteran, and the other is a defender, Soljic said and added that citizens of Vukovar and defenders demonstrated unity on Tuesday and will remain united in the time to come. After the latest incident concerning bilingual signs in Vukovar, citizens began gathering in front of the police station where several members of police intervention unit are deployed.

 

INTERNATIONAL PRESS

 

Serbia, IMF discussing 5 pct cut in state administration – minister (Reuters, 23 September 2014)

BELGRADE, Serbia - Serbia is discussing with the International Monetary Fund cutting the work force in the state administration by five percent, a minister was quoted as saying on Tuesday, as the Balkan country pursues a new loan deal.

It follows the announcement last week by Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic of pension and public sector wage cuts in an effort to curtail a budget deficit forecast at 8.3 percent of national output.

Serbia is expected to start full loan negotiations with the IMF after the government revises the 2014 budget later in September or early October.

"We are in talks with the IMF about cutting the number of employees in public sector by five percent," Kori Udovicki, minister for state administration and local self-management, was quoted as telling the Serbian daily Blic.

"We hope to be able to meet this demand to the largest degree as workers retire, but there are concerns that we will have to lay off 25,000 people."

The IMF did not immediately respond to a written request from Reuters for confirmation.

Udovicki specified that she was referring to the state administration, which includes doctors and teachers. The state administration numbers around 500,000 people, in a country of 7.3 million. Another 200,000 are employed in a host of indebted state-owned companies, which together with the state administration makes up the public sector.

Vucic's government wants a three-year precautionary loan deal with the IMF, a safety net that is crucial to reassuring investors worried over the size of the budget deficit and a public debt pile now seen hitting 73 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Analysts say Serbia may need to cut its public sector workforce by more than 100,000 people to put its finances on a stable footing. Unemployment already stands at 20 percent. (Reporting by Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Matt Robinson)

 

Ukraine Economic News Is All Bad, IMF Holds Bosnia’s Fiscal Feet to the Fire (Transitions Online, by Barbara Frye, Ioana Caloianu, and Anders Ryehauge, 22 September 2014)

Plus, Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania strengthen defense ties, and work starts on a key Russia-bypassing gas pipeline

1. Analysts see nothing but danger for Ukraine’s economy

While Ukraine’s military fights Russia-backed separatists in the country’s east, its government is also trying to stave off economic collapse – a battle analysts say Kyiv is losing.

Writing in his widely cited financial blog Sober Look, Walter Kurtz describes a worsening economic crisis marked by plummeting exports and industrial production, a major currency devaluation, and dwindling foreign-exchange reserves as the government seeks to prop up the hryvnya. Inflation is in the double digits and will likely continue to spike as the currency falls, eroding the value of Ukrainians’ paychecks, he says.

“A number of economists now believe that given [the] worsening economic crisis, the country's public debt problem is simply unsustainable and default is becoming increasingly likely,” Kurtz writes.

“Deep economic ties with Russia have resulted in painful adjustments in recent months,” he notes, citing the case of Kyiv-based aircraft maker Antonov, which lost a $150 million sale of planes to the Russian air force recently.

Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs said default was looking more likely in Ukraine, with bondholders at risk of losing half of their principal, Bloomberg reported. The firm’s analysts cited capital flight and “disrupted economic output” as a result of the conflict in the east.

A day after the Goldman Sachs issued its caution, the chief of Ukraine’s central bank, Valeria Gontareva, warned the country’s gross domestic product could drop by as much as 10 percent this year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

2. IMF holds up Bosnia loan, demands spending review

Citing an “emerging” budget gap and other issues, the International Monetary Fund has decided to wait until after next month’s parliamentary elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina before disbursing the next tranche of a multiyear loan to the country, Reuters reports.

Ron van Rooden, head of an IMF mission conducting a periodic review of the country’s fiscal management, said the government needed to cut spending not related to recovering from floods that wrecked Bosnia in the spring.

He also urged officials in the country’s two fractious, ethnically designated autonomous regions to work together more closely to fight tax evasion and strengthen banking supervision, according to Reuters.

Bosnia had agreed upon a 380 million euro ($488 million) loan with the IMF in 2012, but the country’s failure to implement economic reforms put the deal on hold in February.

After a review in June, the IMF doubled its usual allocation of nearly 96 million euros to help Bosnia cope with the flood damage, but disagreements between the Muslim and Croat-dominated Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the predominantly Serb Republika Srpska have hampered the country’s attempts to secure and use international flood relief aid.

Two senior American diplomats blasted the Bosnian government’s flood response in an 18 September post to the blog of the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.

“The politicians of [Bosnia] have shown themselves incapable or unwilling to meet the international community even halfway,” wrote David Barth, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s mission in Bosnia, and U.S. Defense Attaché Scott Miller. They said efforts to rebuild schools and restart businesses would not have been possible without assistance from the EU, USAID, and the Swedish and the Norwegian governments.

 

Israel's Avigdor Lieberman Investigated for Secret Meeting with Bosnian Serb Nationalist Leader (IB Times, by Gianluca Mezzofiore, 22 September 2014)

An Israeli state monitoring body has opened a probe into foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's secret trip to Vienna (made in mid-September 2014), where he met a murky Austrian businessman and Serbian separatist president of Bosnia's Republika Srpska (Serb Republic), Milorad Dodik.

The office of the hawkish politician confirmed that Lieberman held two sensitive diplomatic meetings while in the Austrian capital, leaving the Israeli foreign ministry's officials in the shadows. The meetings, made on his way to official visits in Lithuania and the US, also took the Austrian foreign ministry by surprise. They were revealed after an investigation by the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

State Comptroller Joseph Shapira, who oversees all the policies and operations of the Israeli government, started the investigation at the request of Labour member of Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Shelly Yacimovich.

Yacimovich asked Shapira to check whether taxpayers' money was used for Lieberman's trip and why top foreign officials were not informed.

It is unclear why Liberman chose to hide his meeting with Dodik, a close friend and ally.

Dodik is the president of Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic, which was carved out after the Dayton agreement that ended the bloody 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

The Bosnian Serbs have resisted reforms at state level and slowed moves towards the EU and Nato. Dodik undermined efforts to consolidate Bosnia as a unitary state, even calling for Republika Srpska to separate from Bosnia and join Serbia. In April, the Serb nationalist threatened to hold a referendum on secession, seizing on the Crimean referendum and subsequent Russian annexation as an example of self-determination in action.

The other meeting involved Austrian businessman Martin Schlaff, who has been linked to Lieberman on corruption charges.

Schlaff, a 61-year-old businessman born to Jewish refugees from World War II, was investigated for his alleged ties with the Stasi and the smuggling of goods to embargo-hit East Germany. In 1998, Schlaff opened a casino in Jericho aimed at Israelis who could not gamble in their homeland because it was forbidden by law.

He was later probed for bribing officials, including former Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, and Lieberman for a sum that amounts to $3 million. In April 2011, Lieberman was put under investigation for the bribe.

 

Newly Appointed US Ambassador to Macedonia 'Negates' Macedonians Existence (RIA Novosti, by Ekaterina Blinova 22 September 2014)

MOSCOW - A statement given by Jess Lippincott Baily, the newly appointed US Ambassador in Republic of Macedonia, has sparked a heated debate among ethnic Macedonians, who claim that the Ambassador "negates the existence of the Macedonian people."

"Mr. Jess Lipinkot Bailey will come to service in the country in which he negates the existence of the Macedonian people. Namely, during a questioning in the Committee on Foreign Relations he expressed that Macedonian Slavs were a majority and ethnic Albanians a minority in the country," writes Mina, a Macedonian web resource, in an article "New US Ambassador, Not Making Friends in Macedonia."

The roots of the problem lie in the long-standing dispute between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece regarding the so-called "name issue." The Greek government argues that the Republic of Macedonia does not have the right to use its name, as in Greece there also is a region called Macedonia. Because of the long standing territorial dispute between the two countries, Athens has blocked Macedonia's request for NATO and EU membership.

"The most worrying thing here is that the new US Ambassador has an identical position with Athens - to negate Macedonians. The Macedonian Government may not have the courage to deny Jess Baily the Ambassadorial post to Macedonia and ask for a new diplomat, someone who doesn't insult the country, however Mr. Baily has ensured his stay will be uncomfortable and short," the Macedonian web resource stresses.

The crux of the problem is that the American Ambassador avoids using the word "Macedonians", instead replacing it with the term "Slavs." The Macedonian population is inclined to consider him "unfriendly" and pro-Greece. In this light, they express deep concerns about US-Macedonian relations.

Remarkably, though the Macedonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has emphasized it was discontent with Jess Baily's stance, the FM's statement written on the official website in Macedonian language has not been translated into English.

In addition, the local Macedonian media is discussing the US Ambassador's statement.

 

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Media summaries are produced for the internal use of the United Nations Office in Belgrade, UNMIK and UNHQ. The contents do not represent anything other than a selection of articles likely to be of interest to a United Nations readership.