Only a blind person could believe that problems in the Balkans are over, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said late on Tuesday.
The regional conflict will last until the cause of those problems have been found - if you sweep all the problems under the carpet, you will trip over that carpet, Dacic told a talk show broadcast on TV Happy.
US expert on the Balkans Daniel Serwer has commented on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) once again listing the Balkans as a stability problem.
Serwer spoke for the N1 broadcaster in Bosnia-Herzegovina, after the US NGO published its "Preventive Priorities Survey 2017."
Serwer said that he did not think the document should make people in the Balkans "more afraid than they already are."
US State Department official Hoyt Bryan Yee thinks that "integration and transformation" of the Western Balkans is in the interests of Brussels, and the region.
Speaking in Bled, Slovenia, he added that the readiness for this on the part of EU institutions is what is currently missing.
The Balkans is "one of four priorities" of EU's foreign policy, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini has said, Beta reported.
According to the EEAS website, Mogherini, speaking at the opening of the EU Ambassadors conference in Brussels, said that the Balkans was the organization's fourth priority.
"Still looking at our immediate neighborhood, but this is the file on which, as you know very well, we have more to lose and more to gain," she said.
Political analyst and head of the Republic of Serbia Representative Office in Washington Obrad Kesić says, in an interview with today's Blic, that the Balkans are not only the subject of a political fight between the West and Russia, but are also currently the subject of internal struggle about the control over the US foreign policy.
Blic daily reported that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan completely changed his stance on the Balkans, after saying the project of “Greater Albania” is not only bad but also dangerous. He made these remarks in an interview to the Albanian TV station only three days before holding parliamentary elections in Albania.
Turkey's president says "the ideas of some about the unification of Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo into a Greater Albania" are "bad, and unacceptable to Turkey."
According to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey is loudly advocating "respecting sovereignty and integrity of countries in the Balkans."
One of the problems that emerges when U.S. officials and the news media are focused on a small number of foreign-policy issues is that troubling developments can occur below the radar in other areas. That appears to be happening in the Balkans, a region that was a foreign-policy priority of the Western powers in the 1990s, but which has faded to near invisibility in recent years.
The Western Balkan countries are poorer than they were 30 years ago, which is why they will need at least 25 years to reach the EU and therefore Germany has submitted a plan “Berlin process plus”, said project director for the Balkans at the European Institute CIFE in Nice and member of the Advisory group for the Balkan policy in Europe (BiEPAG) Tobias Flessenkemper for the RFE/RL.
He adds that it is still anything but on the level of ideas.