Free Republic

THE HAGUE — Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, was convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, by a United Nations tribunal on Thursday for leading a campaign of terror against civilians that included the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 and the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo. Mr. Karadzic, 70, was sentenced to 40 years in prison. The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Mr. Karadzic of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre, which aimed to kill “every able-bodied male” in the town and systematically exterminate the Bosnian Muslim community...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday criticized an eastern European proposal to close the Balkans refugee route and vowed to push for a plan with Turkey to reduce the influx, at an EU summit. Merkel, under heavy pressure at home to reduce arrivals, supports a plan under which transit country Turkey would seal its borders and then fly refugees to Europe where they would be settled under an EU quota system. However, most countries in the European Union have shown little enthusiasm for the idea, and the so-called Visegrad Four - Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary - have openly...

A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who protested his indefinite confinement with a lengthy hunger strike has taken the unusual step of turning down a chance to finally leave the U.S. base in Cuba, rejecting an offer to be resettled in an unfamiliar new country. Muhammad Bawazir, a 35-year-old from Yemen, refused to board a plane as two other prisoners were being flown out for resettlement in the Balkans, his lawyer, John Chandler, said Thursday. Since returning to his homeland was not an option, he insisted on being sent to a country where he has family. Chandler said he spent months trying...

The seat of government in the capital, Pristina, briefly caught fire after it came under a hail of petrol bombs. Firefighters quickly doused the flames and police used tear gas to drive back several thousand opposition demonstrators. They were protesting against a European Union-brokered deal to give Kosovo's ethnic Serb minority greater local government powers and the possibility of financing from Belgrade. Opposition leaders say the government should resign over the accord and call an early election. ... Kosovo's government has accused opposition party leaders of organizing the violence and attempting to drag the country into "crime and anarchy." "The...

Dom Raso calls out Hillary Clinton's false claims of having dodged sniper fire as dishonorable and proof that she is unworthy to lead our country. NRA video.

Bosnian police arrested a wartime Muslim army commander on Tuesday on charges of failing to prevent crimes committed by foreign Islamic fighters against captive Bosnian Serb soldiers during a 1992-1995 war. The arrest of 63-year-old retiree Sakib Mahmuljin was carried out on orders of the state war crimes prosecutor, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. "The suspect is under investigation for acting in contravention of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions while serving as a commander of the 3rd Corps of the Army of BiH," it said. Mahmuljin has denied the charges during earlier proceedings. Many Islamic fighters,...

Top diplomats are gathering in Paris for a UNESCO conference where they will decide whether to grant Kosovo membership and how much sway the United States will have in the organization. The Obama administration is lobbying to keep the U.S. seat on the scientific and cultural agency's influential executive board, though the United States stopped paying its dues after UNESCO admitted Palestine as a member in 2011. ...

Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi provided al-Qaida with chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction before changing heart and agreeing to destroy his arms program, Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin has learned. Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kussa told U.S. and UK spy agencies that tens of thousands of weapons had been produced at 10 secret sites in the country. Kussa has named hundreds of what he termed "sleeper" al-Qaida agents in Britain and the U.S. Gadhafi's dramatic turnaround has earned him a future meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush. He was welcomed back on to the world stage...

Germany expects to receive up to 800,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, a new record, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said on Wednesday, as he urged action from the European level on the crisis. "This development is a challenge for us all," de Maiziere told reporters as he announced the new official estimate. Berlin had previously expected 500,000 asylum-seekers to arrive this year. Germany, the EU's most populous country and top economy, has struggled to accommodate a flood of asylum-seekers from war zones such as Syria but also from countries without military conflict in southeastern Europe, including Albania, Serbia and Kosovo. ......

For years I have been saying it: Most Americans still don’t know or understand the implications of America’s support of the jihad in Europe, but that’s exactly what Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Balkans was. Clinton sent American soldiers to fight alongside Bosnian mujahedeen against the Serb Christians in the Bosnia war. The Democrats aligned with the jihad then and the Democrats align with the jihad now, despite the thousands of Americans slaughtered at their hand. Here is yet more of the unending poisonous yield of Clinton’s vicious ill-conceived war. I continue to take heat for my support of...

Back in the 1990s something happened in central Bosnia-Herzegovina that inspired people to this day and helps explain why that country now has more men fighting in Syria and Iraq (over 300), as a proportion of its population, than most in Europe. The formation of a "Mujahideen Battalion" in 1992, composed mainly of Arab volunteers in central Bosnia, was a landmark. Today the dynamic of jihad has been reversed and it is Bosnians who are travelling to Arab lands. "There is a war between the West and Islam," says Aimen Dean, who, as a young Saudi Arabian volunteer, travelled to...

And you thought Sidney Blumenthal was shady. Few people have heard of Cody Shearer, the unsanctioned diplomat, private eye, and Clinton flunky whose name surfaced in connection with the so-called intelligence reports Sidney Blumenthal was channeling to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department. But this shadowy fixture of the Clinton machine was everywhere in the 1990s — including war-torn Bosnia, where he became the subject of a State Department investigation after he represented himself as an agent of the U.S. government and took cash from a genocidal warlord. Now evidence suggests Shearer, working with his partner Blumenthal,...

British jihadis recruited by Islamic State are using land routes run by human traffickers to travel unnoticed via the Balkans to fight in Syria—and to slip back into the UK. Experts warn this means there is no check or record of the fighter traveling across Europe—a journey that can take weeks—and over the Turkish border or, crucially, making the journey home. As a result, battle-hardened jihadis could be returning undetected to the UK from Syria and Iraq to potentially strike at home. …

(Original title too long: Muslims, Well Trained And Armed, Ambush Police Officers, Murder Five Police Officers, Injure Thirty More Officers, In Well Orchestrated Attack To Purposefully Help Usher In The Ottoman Empire) Well trained and armed Muslims in the Macedonian city of Kumanovo attacked police officers, killing five officers, and injuring thirty officers. The Muslims went into a rampage, burning down multiple homes as well. This was a very well orchestrated and calculated attack that is being done for the purpose of causing so much violent tension that it will lead to instability. This societal friction will be a part...

EPISODE 7: THE FINAL CHETNIK OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE AXIS / REVIEW by Carl Savich: Documentary Series "The Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the Second World War" The Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the Second World War [2 Series: Why Were the Balkans Given Over to Communist Control?] is the second part of a documentary series consisting of six approximately 30 minute episodes. This series continues from part one which consisted of six episodes that examined the German invasion and subsequent occupation and dismemberment of Yugoslavia released in 2014. The first series analyzed the period from the German invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia...

(Reuters) - The unification of Albania and Serbia's majority-Albanian former province of Kosovo is "inevitable", whether it happens through membership of the European Union or not, Albania's prime minister said on Tuesday. The suggestion was denounced in Belgrade, where a senior official accused Tirana's Prime Minister Edi Rama of "banging the war drums" over Kosovo, which many Serbs regard as the cradle of their nation and Orthodox Christian faith. Serbia and the West are sensitive to any talk of unification of Albania and Kosovo, something Western powers ruled out when they backed Kosovo's secession from Serbia in 2008. Kosovo and...

If the western Balkan states were admitted to the EU, it would be beneficial to both sides, says Michael Roth, State Minister for Europe in the German foreign ministry, in an interview with DW. […] “I want to encourage the western Balkan states that want to belong to the European Union. There is no question: The road ahead of us is surely rocky, but it is worth it. We are not just an economic community, but also, above all, a union of values.” […] … “EU expansion lies in the interest of the states in the Western Balkans; it lies...

Leaving Kosovo: Exodus of young people as frustration soars By Guy De Launey BBC News, Kosovo 22 March 2015 From the section Europe "We are like two million birds in one cage, but we are hoping for a better life" The scene in Mitrovica's 7 Arte Cafe seems convivial enough. Fairy lights twinkle, a mixture of Albanian and English-language hits play over the sound system and the 20-somethings gathered around the tables regularly break into laughter. But the joviality papers over a grim reality for these young people. Kosovo may have unilaterally declared independence from Serbia seven years ago, but...

STANOVC, Kosovo — The extended Cakaj family has built a few dozen homes here, along Tony Blair Street, between the Dubai supermarket and the French peacekeepers base, in a clannish faith that closeness would bring security. But recently the family of Kosovo Albanians has begun to splinter, as a disastrous economy, static politics and a newly created opening in the border with Serbia have enticed tens of thousands of Kosovars to leave their troubled land in search of opportunity and work. “My son had no choice,” said Xhevat Cakaj, but to leave their enclave for Germany with his wife and...

...its lowest levels against the dollar for almost a year, amid investor nervousness about emerging markets. By evening trade in Istanbul the currency had fallen beyond TL2.30 to the US dollar, more than 1 per cent down on the day and the weakest level since January, when the Turkish central bank moved to increase interest rates -- a dramatic shift in policy that at the time halted a precipitous drop in its value. ...Turkey is far from alone in being affected by strong US economic data that has heightened expectations of a US Federal Reserve interest rate rise and so...