Balkan News

The local assembly in Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad, has been accused of distorting history for voting to erect a monument to the alleged victims of crimes by Yugoslav Communist Partisan forces.

Albanian President Ilir Meta has appealed to Albanians in Macedonia to vote for the historic 'name' deal between Macedonia and Greece.

The government in Podgorica says it is still considering an Italian request for Montenegro to take in some of the migrants stuck in an Adriatic port in Sicily.

Kosovo's integration minister has sounded optimistic ahead of an important vote on Thursday by the European Parliament's Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, LIBE, on visa liberalisation.

The US Air Force is to spend 40 million dollars on modernizing a base in central Transylvania, Romania, in order to further deter Russian ambitions in the region. 

Serbian law experts say that any final deal with Kosovo, changing the country’s borders, will affect the constitution and must therefore go to a referendum.

With heavy fines and seizures of merchandise, Tirana’s municipal police are driving out the vendors, who used to make a living by selling their wares on the streets of Albania’s capital.

To mark International Day of the Disappeared, relatives of people who went missing in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and Albania during the 1990s wars or under Communism describe the agony of waiting decades to discover their loved ones’ fate.

The assembly in the northern Serb-run side of the Kosovo town of Mitrovica has named a street after the murdered politician Oliver Ivanovic – angering Ivanovic’s party, which said it had another street in mind.

Three former High Representatives for Bosnia and Herzegovina in an open letter to EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini have urged EU member states not to agree to any plans for swapping territory between Serbia and Kosovo.

The Centre for Investigative Journalism of Serbia rebuffed the Bosnian Serb President, Milorad Dodik's claims that its editor-in-chief Dino Jahic is financed by the West to help 'topple' governments.

Coming to terms with new realities and (re)discovering old ones seems to be the common theme of our premium selection of articles this week, whether looking at the continuing saga of relations between Belgrade and Pristina, secret Communist security service files or – more pleasantly – interesting tourist spots to visit in the region. 

The trial of former Bosnian Serb Army soldier Radomir Susnjar, charged with participating in the murder of 57 people in the Visegrad area, starts on Friday before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed strong support for Macedonia’s accession to NATO and the EU, after meeting Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov on Wednesday in Washington.

Organisers of a traditional Serbian song festival in Petrinja, in Croatia, have accused local Croatian war veterans of trying to stop them – and have taken their complaints to the UN's cultural heritage arm, UNESCO.

Bosnia has sought the extradition of Husein Mujanovic, a former soldier in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was arrested in Serbia in July for alleged war crimes during the wars of the 1990s.

Ethnic Albanians in the Presevo Valley ‘dream’ of joining Kosovo, but few see it as a silver bullet for life’s daily grind. The result may only be more ethnic strife.

The Moldovan lawyer and director of a human rights NGO Ion Manole fears that his country is heading in a wrong direction – away from democracy and towards becoming an autocratic state.

The national team’s success in the World Cup in Russia this year could only paper over the mess of political interference and corruption that has devoured Croatian football. But one club has taken a different path.

Fr Paolo Cortese, from the northwestern Bulgarian town of Belene, is organising a commemorative pilgrimage around places in Bulgaria that saw atrocities committed on behalf of various authoritarian regimes in the 20th century.