The Kosovo authorities and rights campaigners launched a national petition urging the United Nations to produce a report about rapes committed during the late 1990s conflict. The authorities set up tents on Monday in towns across Kosovo, excluding Serb-majority areas, where people could sign the petition calling on the UN to finally establish the facts about rapes by Serbian fighters during the 1998-99 war. “Today we can tell these women that we are with them, that we are their voice and that we want the perpetrators of those genocidal crimes to be brought before international justice,” said

Albanians and Serbs individed northern Kosovo are marking out their respectives territories by erecting rival monuments named after their respective heroes. Ethnic Albanians have responded to the construction of a new "Tsar Lazar" square on the main bridge of the divided town of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo by erecting concrete constructions of their own. Following the construction of the new square on the northern side of town on Wednesday, ethnic Albanians erected a concrete monument named "the KLA", the Kosovo Liberation Army, in the northern village of Suhodoll/Suvi Do. Locals also told

A German parliamentary delegation has told Serbia it must implement the EU-led deal with Kosovo in full if it is to realise its EU accession hopes. German parliamentarians, on a two-day visit to Serbia, have told the Belgrade government they want to more action on Kosovo before Serbia can further its aspirations to join the EU The chief request of the delegation led by Andreas Schneckenhof, from the ruling Christian Democratic Union, CDU, “is implementation of Brussels agreement reached with Kosovo.

A new square erected over the bridge in the divided northern town of Mitrovica, apparently designed to stop it reopening to traffic, has revived tensions between local Serbs and Albanians in the south. Kosovo Serbs have begun building a square named after a medieval Serbian emperor on the bridge that separates the ethniclly and politically divided town in northern Kosovo. Construction on the “Tsar Lazar” square began on Wednesday by the same construction company that removed the recently built “Peace Park” there. Lazar, a 14th-century ruler of Serbia, led the country into battle against inv

A witness told the war crimes trial of former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Sylejman Selimi, who is now Kosovo’s ambassador to Tirana, that the defendant assaulted him several times. The protected witness codenamed ‘Witness A’ testified on Tuesday that while he was held at the KLA’s detention centre in Likovc/Likovac in the autumn of 1998, Selimi accused him of collaborating with Serb forces and assaulted him. “Hey you, Serbian spy, he called to me,” Witness A said. The witness, who testified via video-link, said he was beaten up several times and still has health problems as a result ev

03 Jul 14 At a ceremony to mark the beginning of the construction of a highway connecting Pristina and Skopje, Kosovo and Macedonian officials said it would bring Albanians in both countries closer. Pristina

03 Jul 14 Hashim Thaci’s ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo is convinced it will succeed in forming a new government, but it’s unclear how it will get the votes, with the opposition united against him. Edona Peci, Nektar Zogiani BIRN Pristina Thanks to Kosovo’s Constitutional Court, Hashim Thaci is assured that he will get the first chance at forming the next government – but the odds of success are stacked against him.

30 Jun 14 The authorities will investigate two more locations near a mass grave in the Serbian town of Raska, where the remains of 50 Kosovo Albanians thought to have been killed in wartime were found. Marija Ristic BIRN Belgrade Serbia’s Chief War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said on Monday that the aim of the new search near the Rudnica quarry in Raska is “to determine information about the possible existence of new mass graves with the remains of people who died during the conflicts in Kosovo and Metohija in 1999, who it is believed are Kosovo Albanians”. The Serbian authorities a