LOCAL PRESS

 

Djuric: Let's be a tough nut to crack (RTS)

Director of the Government Office for Kosovo, Marko Djuric has strongly condemned the destructive demonstrations in the southern part of Kosovska Mitrovica and said that they were directed against the peace, "co-existence" and the normalization of relations between the Serbian and Albanian people.

Djuric has called on slowing down tensions and stressed that this event deepens anxiety among the citizens of Kosovo of "Serbian nationality" and highlights the necessity of dialogue, the office announced.

"It is better to negotiate for a thousand days than to fight for one day" Djuric said and added that Serbia holds an outstretched hand for working on building confidence and creating a stable and peaceful future for all citizens in Kosovo. Marko Djuric said that negotiations between Serbia and the EU will not be conditioned by the behavior of Pristina, and pointed out that the time has come for the establishment of the Community of Serbian Municipalities in Kosovo.

"What is essential, for us, now, is that the agenda takes on those Articles four, five and six of the Brussels agreement, i.e. the formation of the Association of Serbian municipalities and the realization of many important responsibilities and we will work on it in the coming period," Director of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija said for RTS.

Speaking about the work of the Kosovo Privatization Agency, Djuric said that this institution and its activities primarily interfere with the Serbs in the enclaves, as it is trying to dispose of the main building in the center of town and places where Serbs live.

The Privatisation Agency of Kosovo, Djuric warned that liquidation of companies that allegedly do not work, and interfering with their premises, in this case disturbed the internally displaced persons (IDPs), as was the case in Strpce.

"We use all the instruments that the state of Serbia has at its disposal in this regard," Djuric said.

When it comes to the formation of the executive institutions in Pristina, Djuric believes that representatives of the Serbian List and the Kosovo Serbs will use all political and legal means to establish and keep open the question of the distribution of seats.

"I think that in general, with our participation in the political process, our community is gaining strength. Now it's important that we're all gathered together and unified, so as to be a 'tough nut', as that is the only way we could struggle for the Community of Serbian municipalities to have sufficient political power" Djuric said.

 

13 officers and 6 protesters injured in riots (Tanjug)

A total of 13 police officers, 6 protesters and 2 reporters were injured in the protest in southern Kosovska Mitrovica near the main bridge on the Ibar River on Sunday.

Spokesman of the Kosovo Police Service for southern Mitrovica Avni Zahiti said that 5 people have been arrested so far but the police reports are not final yet, media reported.

As the consequence of the use of flammable substances by protesters, four vehicles were set on fire, two of them belonging to the Kosovo Police Service, one owned by EULEX and one more in UNMIK possession, Zahiti said.

Two reporters were injured in the clashes between the police and protesters -Faton Ismajli of the Express suffered a blow to the head by a stone thrown by the protesters and Behar Mustafa was battered by a group of 10 protesters.

The southern Mitrovica Albanians organised a protest near the bridge on the Ibar River over the Peace park construction which was built on the main bridge over the Ibar after the concrete block was removed from the spot.

Protesters clashed with the police cordon onlooking the protest. Protesters threw stones and bottles at members of the Kosovo Police Service and EULEX who responded by using tear gas and shock bombs.

Members of the U.S. KFOR contingent are still deployed on the main Ibar bridge and members of the Kosovo Police Service and EULEX are standing on the northern side of the bridge.

 

Nikolic: Serbia as a guarantor of the Dayton Treaty (RTRS)

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic said that Serbia is a guarantor of the Dayton Peace Accords, which entail the preservation of Republika Srpska (RS), adding that he has exceptionally positive cooperation with RS leadership and President Milorad Dodik.

”The Dayton Treaty was constantly tumbled and it was to remain a dead letter when it comes to Serbs' rights, while Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) was to be promoted through the tumbling of the Dayton Treaty,” Nikolic said in an interview for the Radio Television of RS.

Since the adoption of the Dayton Treaty, there was no wish to build BiH as a country of entities and ethnicities with equal rights and instead, everyone strove to break down RS, he said.

Speaking about the forthcoming October elections in BiH, Nikolic noted that as the president of Serbia, he will cooperate with everyone who earns the citizens' trust, noting that it is not up to him to support or not support any political option.

Nikolic said that representatives of Serbia initially planned to visit Sarajevo to mark the 100th anniversary of the Sarajevo Assassination and the beginning of World War I but they decided not to because they do not want to participate in history revisions.

Nikolic stated that the attempted history reviews concerning World War I did not produce the results some might have expected to see and Serbs can thus look forward to the 100th anniversary of World War I with dignity despite certain revisionist tendencies.

“We have faced with dignity the celebration of the 100th anniversary, the memory of our Gavrilo Princip and the entire idea of Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia). This is marvellous for the Serbian people and we are not interested in others' interpretation of it,” Nikolic told RTRS.

 

 

REGIONAL PRESS

 

Croatian parliament: on the Cyrillic alphabet before the summer recess (Hina)

Zagreb - The Croatian parliament might request the country’s Constitutional Court to assess the constitutionality of a possible referendum question limiting the use of Cyrillic alphabet before the summer recess.

The initiative was launched by Headquarters for the ‘Defense of Vukovar’, a Croatian right-wing organization that is fighting against the use of Cyrillic in Croatia.

The organization submitted to the parliament, in December last year, as they mentioned, more than 650 thousand signatures for a referendum in which citizens would decide whether national minorities in the communities where they are more than 50 percent, instead of 33 percent of the total population, as is the case now, should have the right for official use of their language.

"As soon as we get information from the government that enough signatures for a referendum have been collected, the Committee on the Constitution will consider this letter. I will do so personally, assuming that the sufficient number of signatures has been collected, pledge to propose to Parliament to ask the Constitutional Court to assess the constitutionality of proposed referendum question, “Committee Chairman Pedja Grbin said the news agency Hina.

Administration Minister Arsen Bauk confirmed that the signatures on the referendum initiative on bilingualism have been checked and he expects that the Government adopted its conclusion at the session in two weeks.

Explaining why the verification of signatures lasted so long, given that the Committee on the Constitution has asked for it at the beginning of April, Bauk explained that the Information System Support Agency (APIS) had other priorities.

In the meantime, the elections for the European Parliament, at which citizens without Croatian citizenship had voting right for the first time, were held, he said.

"As soon as they finished that job, APIS started checking the signatures on the referendum initiative and the work was completed relatively quickly," Bauk said.

The headquarters in Vukovar is, by the way, except for requiring referendum on the Cyrillic alphabet also known for organizing protests in September last year in Vukovar, where forcibly removing and destroying of bilingual boards on state institutions buildings began.

The Croatian government has previously announced the constitutional changes so that referendum issues that limit the rights of minorities would not be allowed.

 

BiH: Custody for the arrested in "Pandora" (Beta)

Sarajevo - The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina ordered the detention of arrested persons in “Pandora” action since they are suspected of abuse of power and money laundering.

The suspects in the Causevic case, proposal by the State Prosecution, a taking into custody has been ordered due to the possibility of concealment or destruction of evidence, influence on witnesses and flight risk.

Taking into custody is determined for the prime suspect Kemal Causevic, Zdravko Cvjetinovic, Anes Sadikovic, Janko Jovanovic, Milanko Nikic, Miroslav Kragulj, Zoran Cvjetinovic, Enisa Imsirovic and Jusuf Cosic.

The suspects were arrested in “Pandora” action conducted by members of the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) in which more than 40 people in multiple locations across BiH were detained.

 

INTERNATIONAL PRESS

 

Kosovo Albanians torch cars, police fire rubber bullets in divided town (Reuters, By Fatos Bytyci, 22 June 2014)

MITROVICA Kosovo - Police in Kosovo fired teargas and rubber bullets on Sunday at ethnic Albanian rioters burning police cars and lobbing rocks in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica, in protest at the blockade of the main bridge by ethnic Serbs.

A Reuters reporter saw Polish special police units, part of a European Union mission, open fire with rubber bullets, during one of the worst bouts of civil unrest since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008.The violence broke out when several hundred Albanians, protesting over the Serbs' closure of the bridge for the past three years, began hurling rocks and bottles at Kosovo police.

They set fire to cars belonging to the officers and the EU law and order mission. Kosovo police responded with teargas.

U.S. soldiers, part of a NATO peace force of some 5,000, guarded the bridge in four rows of Humvees. A police spokesman said 13 police officers and 10 civilians were wounded. Five people were arrested. By evening, the situation was calm but NATO troops, EU and Kosovo police were holding their positions.

President Atifete Jahjaga said: "Any attempt to find a solution through the use of violence will further escalate the situation and will be a step backwards.

"Mitrovica has been a frequent flashpoint between Serbs and Albanians since Kosovo's 1998-99 war, when NATO intervened with 11 weeks of air strikes to halt the massacre and expulsion of Albanians by Serbian forces waging a counter-insurgency war.

Serbia does not recognise Kosovo as independent, but agreed to give up de facto control over a small Serb pocket of northern Kosovo last year under a deal brokered by the EU.

In exchange, Belgrade won the green light to open talks on joining the EU. But Serbs in the north are reluctant to integrate with Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.

They blocked the bridge in 2011 following an abortive bid by the Kosovo government to rein in the north. The Serbs dismantled the roadblock on Wednesday, only to replace it with a "Park of Peace" consisting of concrete plant pots and earth.

(Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing by Alison Williams)

 

Russia Says Serbia Linked In To South Stream (NEW EUROPE, by Kostis Geropoulos, 23 June 2014)

The Russian-backed South Stream gas pipeline received a boost from Belgrade this week after Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic told his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov it is in Serbia’s national interest for the project to be built.

Lavrov said on June 17 in Belgrade he expected Serbia to begin building its leg of the Gazprom-led South Stream as planned in July, dismissing mixed signals last week about Belgrade’s commitment to the project. The Serbian section of the pipeline will ultimately have an annual capacity of 40.5 billion cubic metres while stretching for 422.4 kilometres.

“We confirmed our readiness for South Stream and the need to carry it out as it is the only realistic project for gas security in southeastern Europe,” Lavrov said after meeting Dacic in Belgrade. “All agreements remain in force and no changes have occurred,” he said. “We consider that everything will proceed as planned.”

Following Bulgaria’s announcement that it would freeze the construction of South Stream on its territory, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Zoran Mijailovic said on June 9 that Serbia had to suspend the construction of the gas pipeline due to Bulgaria’s decision. But Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said later the same day that Serbia’s government has not taken a decision on South Stream.

Gazprom wants to build South Stream to ensure a reliable route of Russian gas to central and southern Europe, bypassing Ukraine. The pipeline will carry Russian gas via Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Slovenia, reaching its full capacity of some 63 billion cubic metres per year by 2017. The total value of the project is estimated at some €16 billion.

But the European Commission has warned that the intergovernmental agreements between the EU transit countries and Russia may violate EU law.

However, EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said in Vienna on June 16 that a solution could be found for the project. “South Stream is a project that we indeed accept,” he said.

Alexander Kornilov, a senior oil and gas analyst at Moscow’s Alfa Bank, told New Europe on June 19 that Oettinger appears to soften his stance regarding South Stream.

Kornilov argued that the situation with Ukraine represents considerable risks to the stability and reliability of gas supplies and gas transit to Europe.

Following failed Russia-EU-Ukraine talks, Gazprom on June 16 cut off gas supplies to Ukraine as a payment deadline passed. Supply to Europe continued as planned.

“Europe has become much warmer in terms of its perception of South Stream and that means that probably now Russia has chances to discuss the potential exemption from the Third Energy Package,” the Alfa Bank oil and gas analyst said.

“Third-party access to the pipeline is possible and discussable but the question is who is going to use the pipeline besides Gazprom,” Kornilov said.

He reminded that Azerbaijan has already secured its access to the European markets through the construction of the so-called Southern corridor via the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). “Apart from Azerbaijan – from Azeri gas - I don’t really see any alternative suppliers who could be interested in using the South Stream. The situation looks similar to Nord Stream where there are no any other alternative suppliers,” Kornilov said.

 

Montenegro ‘Cannot Detain’ Suspected Serbian Narco-Boss (BIRN, by Dusia Tomovic, 23 June 2014)

Montenegrin police said that alleged drug lord Dragoslav Kosmajac entered the country after fleeing Serbia but could not be detained because there is no warrant for his arrest.

A senior source in the Montenegrin police told BIRN on Monday that Kosmajac, who has been accused of being a narcotics kingpin in Serbia, entered the country freely on Friday because Belgrade has so far not called for his arrest.

“Because no arrest warrant has been issued for him, we could not arrest him. We do not have any official information that any country is seeking his arrest, and he legally entered the territory of Montenegro,” the police source said.

Kosmajac is reported to have fled Serbia after being named on Friday by Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic as the biggest drug lord in the country.

The Montenegrin police source could not confirm reports that he used a Slovakian passport to cross the border.

Montenegrin media reported that Kosmajac was seen in the coastal town of Herceg Novi on Sunday and that a police patrol tried to arrest him and his son Luka Kosmajac.

Vucic denounced Kosmajac at a dramatic press conference on Friday when he announced the dismissal of all the country’s police chiefs because of the failure to fight the narcotics cartels operating in Serbia.

The Serbian premier said he alone was not afraid to name the biggest drug lord in Serbia.

“Everyone is keeping quiet about officials from the police and other services’ contacts with Kosmajac. I have called for action to be taken against him but this has not been done to this day,” Vucic said.

According to Belgrade media reports, Kosmajac was being monitored by Serbian police and the country’s Security Information Agency for four years, and also by the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration.

 

World War I Conference in Sarajevo Divides Scholars (New York Times, By Paul Hockenos, 22 June 2014)

BERLIN — Scholars from the United States and 25 other countries gathered in Sarajevo last week to mark the centennial of World War I.

Titled “The Great War: Regional Approaches and Global Contexts,” the conference was meant to expand and elevate the historical discussion about the war and its outbreak 100 years ago. But rather than a respectful salutation of Europe’s triumph over parochial nationalism, the conference set off an ethnic firestorm in the Balkans that reached the highest political circles. The controversy speaks to how the scholarly interpretation of a crucial turning point like the Great War remains disputed and entangled in present-day politics.

The conference, which ran June 19-21 in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, got off to an awkward start when disagreement flared between its original organizers, the University of Sarajevo’s Institute for History, and Sorbonne historians associated with the French Embassy in Sarajevo.

The French insisted that one of the conference’s purposes be to promote reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the scene of bloody ethnic wars during the 1990s. They wanted the meeting to include intellectuals from the country’s three ethnic groups — Serbs, Croats and Muslims — to celebrate the centennial. According to Slobodan Soja, a Bosnian Serb and former ambassador to France, who contributed to the French proposal, the purpose of the conference was “to start a dialogue between all historians” in the country on World War I.

The Sarajevo history institute, however, favoured a rigorous academic conference of European scholars pursuing cutting-edge research on diverse aspects of the war.

“We wanted to attract historians to talk, discuss, and argue about these topics at the highest level for three full days,” explained one of the organizers, Amir Duranovic, a doctoral student in history at the University of Sarajevo. “We wanted a conference for historians, not for Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.”

In the end, the French pulled out, and the Sarajevo organizers said they were unable to attract a single research-paper submission from the Serb-dominated side of Bosnia and Herzegovina, called Republika Srpska, or to win over a partner institution to act as a co-sponsor from Serbia proper. Republika Srpska historians said they were not invited to the conference, which they would have gladly attended.

Some Serb political leaders have accused the conference of bias against Serbia and say that a revisionist history of World War I is laying the blame for the war, which claimed 37 million lives, at their feet.

“Serbia will neither allow a revision of history, nor will it forget who are the main culprits in World War I,” said Ivica Dacic, a former Serbian prime minister, while Milorad Dodik, president of Republika Srpska, called the conference “a new propaganda attack against the Serbs.”

The antipathies that have flickered over the conference have their roots in the tangled ethnic identities in the Balkans. The choice of Sarajevo for the conference, for example, was loaded: It was in the Bosnian capital on June 28, 1914 that Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, an event that set off a chain reaction leading to the start of military hostilities a month later.

Princip’s nationalist politics and the Serbs’ role in the war remain highly contentious issues, particularly in the Balkans. The Serbs tend to consider Princip a hero who struck a blow against the repressive Habsburg monarchy, which ruled Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time. In recognition of the centennial, monuments to Princip are being constructed in downtown Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and in Serb-dominated eastern Sarajevo.

Mr. Soja, the Bosnian Serb diplomat, explicitly complained that the conference brought together the “losers of the war” — universities from Austria, Hungary and Germany were among the organizers — who refused to afford Princip the honor he deserved.

In contrast with that view, most historians from the region and elsewhere in Europe have tended to see Princip as a terrorist, rather than a hero.

The conference, moreover, took place against the background of many new commemorative publications, including the Australian historian Prof. Christopher M. Clark’s account of World War I’s origins, titled “The Sleepwalkers.” An astounding global success, Professor Clark’s book has prompted a substantial revision among historians of the war’s causes. Whereas in the past German nationalism and bellicosity were singled out as disproportionately culpable, Mr. Clark lays equal blame on the other great powers, France, Russia, and Britain.

Furthermore, he argues that Princip was directly or indirectly an arm of Serbia’s intelligence services, not a Bosnian teenager acting on his own. Mr. Clarke also links Serbia’s expansionist campaign at the beginning of the 20th century, and its brutality, to the ethnic cleansing and war crimes of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.

In Serbia, the response to his theses has been loud and unequivocal. The commonly heard view is that Serbia fought valiantly against Germany and the Habsburg Empire on the side of the Entente alliance, which the United States joined in 1917. Serbia sacrificed greatly for the cause, losing nearly half of the men it mobilized.

The Serbian news media has rallied to the country’s defense with headlines like “Austrians Planned the First World War a Year before the Murder of Ferdinand”; “Vienna had a War Plan in 1913”; and “We are not to Blame for the War.”

“I admit that I wholly underestimated the passionate approaches to the topic and its meaning for today’s politics in the region,” said one of the conference’s organizers, Attila Pok, a historian at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in Budapest, who tried to broker a compromise between the opposing sides.

Still, Mr. Pok said he stood by the choice of Sarajevo for the conference, citing its symbolic significance.

“This city still carries the scars of the war,” he said.

Another member of the organizing committee, Florian Bieber, director of the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, in Austria, said that historians from Serbia proper were expected to participate in the conference but that the organizers could not persuade a Serbian university to co-sponsor the event.

Mr. Bieber rejected the charge of anti-Serb bias, saying that only two of more than 40 panels had been scheduled to deal with the Sarajevo assassination. He also noted that Mark A. Mazower of Columbia University, not Christopher Clark, was scheduled to deliver the keynote lecture, he noted.

Mr. Bieber said that Serbs had overreacted to the Clark book and to the intention of the conference. “Clark doesn’t blame Serbia for the war, but rather the Great Powers — all of them,” he said. “Clark is hard on Serbia, more so than most historians, but in Serbia his theses are deliberately misread,” he added, attributing this to domestic politics.

The controversy around the conference, Mr. Bieber wrote in a recent essay in Balkan Insight, suggested that forthcoming commemorations would “not be shaped by reflecting on the past, but by making use of the past for the present.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2014, in The International New York Times.

 

Macedonia Opposition Sets Terms For Crisis Talks (BIRN, by Sinisa Jakov Marusic, 23 June 2014)

As the opposition sets five conditions for ending the political crisis in the country, planned talks between party leaders have been postponed to next week.

Zoran Zaev, head of the main opposition Social Democratic Party, SDSM, has set five terms that he said the government of Nikola Gruevski must meet if they plan to end the post-election crisis.

The five conditions that Zaev set at a press conference on Thursday are the formation of a caretaker government, separation of party and state activities, better regulation of the media, improvements to the electoral laws and carrying out national head count to determine how many voters there are.

Ahead of his first meeting with Gruevski, set for Friday but now rescheduled for Tuesday - aimed at ironing out arguments that followed the April elections - Zaev said that they will not accept any deal if a guarantor from the European Union is not present.

“Our experience from previous deals with Nikola Gruevski shows that they remain undelivered," he said.

"In order to take him seriously this time, we insist that the opposition plays its part in anything that we might possibly agree and that there is guarantor from the European Union," he added.

In May, all 33 opposition MPs - bar one - submitted written resignations to the 123-seat parliament after alleging fraud in the April general and presidential elections.

The opposition insisted that Gruevski's ruling VMRO DPMNE party won both elections by fraud and demanded the formation of a caretaker government to prepare new elections.

The resignations of the opposition MPs did not greatly affect the work of the new parliament, as 89 of the 123 seats remain filled which was enough for Gruevski's new government to be endorsed on Thursday.

But the political dispute could damage Macedonia's already stalled prospects of European and Atlantic integration.

Amid media reports of covert Brussels-instigated talks aimed at ending the crisis, both parties said their leaders have agreed to meet to open a dialogue on problematic issues.

"I believe the opposition MPs will soon return to this [parliament] chamber, as they were begging the people so much to give them an opportunity to sit in it", Gruevski told the parliament on Thursday, referring to the election campaign.

The opposition insists that Gruevski, who has held power since 2006, and who described the April elections as flawless, has usurped institutions and left no space for a functioning democratic process.

It says only a caretaker government can organize the next elections in order for them to be free and fair.

“We must restore democracy in Macedonia. Institutions must be freed and allowed to act professionally. The future of this country are EU and NATO and not this 'hybrid regime',” Zaev said, citing sections of a Freedom Houses study entitled "Nations in Transit 2014" that was released this month.

In it Macedonia for the first time was described as a “Transitional hybrid regime”. The report also noted a marked decline in the independence of the media and in the fight against corruption.

 

 

 

 

 

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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.