While Balkan countries have curbed the flow of fighters to foreign wars, the online space is still a haven for Islamist extremists who remain out of reach there, recruiting and spreading messages of hate.
Russia will not recognize Kosovo - Moscow does not and never will barter with Serbia's territorial integrity, say Russian experts.
Sputnik is reporting that this reaction came in the wake of claims made by western analysts that "Russia could recognize Kosovo in order to reach a deal with the US."
Russian experts say that such statements look like an attempt of their Western counterparts to "drive a wedge" between Russia and Serbia.
In response to Jasmin Mujanovic’s comment article, ‘New Partitions are the Last Thing the Balkans Need,’ Timothy Less maintains that the Balkan countries lack even the most basic elements needed to make multi-ethnicity work, so it is time to consider a new territorial settlement.
The starting point when formulating policy is to recognise the world as it is, not as one would like it to be.
It is no surprise that none of the four agreements signed last year have got anywhere when both governments have been insincere about the normalisation process from the beginning.
From the start, the Brussels negotiation process met with serious criticism from civil society and public. The lack of transparency in the process and the exclusion of all parts of society except for governments contributed to the growth of fear and distrust among people on both sides.
Kosovo has been one of Europe’s most pro-American states since the United States helped it break free of Serbian control. Yet in a generational shift in this largely secular country, Islamic radicalisation is making some in-roads among the young. And it’s not only men who have gone east to join Isis.
Security experts in Kosovo say most Kosovan women who join ISIS do so to follow husbands who want to fight (...) but a few independent women go for their own reasons, considering they are on a sacred mission.
Kosovo Serb leader Ivanovic’s martial arts skills brought him to politics, and he was once seen as a key figure in Kosovo-Serbia dialogue - but he now faces jail for war crimes against Albanians.
“I am completely innocent,” Oliver Ivanovic, the head of the Freedom, Democracy, Justice political party in the Serb-majority north of the divided Kosovo town of Mitrovica, told a court in August 2014.
Convicted criminals from Kosovo and Serbia only have to cross each other’s borders in order to escape serving jail sentences for the crimes that they committed.
Lemja Xhema got a hero’s welcome when she arrived in the town of Fushe Kosove near Pristina earlier this month, campaigning for votes in a municipal election.
In some other countries however, Xhema would have been in jail, not running for election.
Serbia’s premier is likely to come under renewed pressure during his US visit this week to resolve the murders of the Bytyqi brothers, three Albanian-Americans killed in Serbia in 1999.
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/no-indictements-in-us-albanian-murder-case-09-15-2015Kosovo Serbs hope that President Tomislav Nikolic’s new ‘Kosovo platform’ will finally address the longstanding issue of Serbs who were abducted or went missing during and after the war.
The Association of Missing and Kidnapped Kosovo Serbs said on Monday that Nikolic’s so-called ‘Kosovo platform’ was their “last hope” of finding out what happened to more than 1,000 Kosovo Serbs who went missing during and after the 1999 war.