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BANJA LUKA, Bosnia 9 (Reuters) - The Bosnian Serb president urged top fugitives Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic on Friday to stop holding his region "hostage" and surrender for trial at the U.N. war crimes court in The Hague. Serb Republic President Dragan Cavic issued the latest of many calls to the two men to end their decade-old flight from justice, two days after the capture in Spain of top Croatian war crimes fugitive Ante Gotovina, in hiding since 2001. "I once again call on Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to surrender to The Hague tribunal," Cavic told reporters on...

Haradinaj, who faces charges of murder, rape and the deportation of Serb civilians and as well of some ethnic Albanians treated as collaborators with Serbian regime, during his time as a leader of ethnic Albanian rebels, has denied the charges. .... The Tribunal’s Appeals Chamber today ruled to stay the Trial Chamber's decision rendered on 12 October 2005 which would have allowed Ramush Haradinaj "to appear in public and engage in public political activities." The court’s chamber said in a statement

AMP BONDSTEEL, Kosovo (Army News Service, Dec. 19, 2005) – Multinational Brigade East Soldiers captured escaped fugitive Ramadan Shiti and two associates, Mehmet Dalipi and Ahmet Shkret, Dec. 16 near the village of Drobnjak. Shiti, wanted under both international and Kosovo arrest warrants, was taken into custody at about 9:15 p.m. by military police Soldiers from MNB(E)’s Task Force Dragoon and Kosovo Police Service officers following a nearly six hour pursuit through a rough and remote region of the Kacanik municipality. KFOR soldiers from the Polish-Ukrainian Peacekeeping Battalion and Task Force Shadow, MNB(E)’s aviation support battalion, also assisted in the...

Islamist state in Europe? By Jeffrey T. Kuhner Published December 18, 2005 The Bush administration has decided to get involved in another dangerous nation-building project -- in the volatile Balkans. More ominously, the effects of this intervention will lay the groundwork for an Islamist state in the heart of Europe. Recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the leaders of Bosnia's three main groups -- Muslims, Serbs and Croats -- met in Washington to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Accords, which ended Europe's worst bloodletting since 1945. The administration should have limited itself to a symbolic remembrance. Instead,...

Republika Srpska Defense Minister Milovan Stankovic has proposed to donate surplus weapons to Afghanistan, the Banja Luka daily "Nezavisne Novine" reported on 15 December. If the proposal is accepted by Bosnian Serb authorities, the Afghan government would receive thousands of automatic rifles and several hundred machine guns. The surplus weapons were to destroyed, Stankovic said. According to a report the United States proposed that the Bosnian Serb forces send their surplus weapons to Afghanistan. AT

BBC Monitoring International Reports - December 13, 2005, Tuesday Text of report by Kosovo Serb radio Kontakt Plus on 13 December [Announcer] Material evidence suggesting the guilt of the former Kosovo Liberation Army [UCK in Albanian; OVK in Serbian] commander for Klecka, Fatmir Limaj - evidence of giving orders and murdering Serb civilians - was submitted to the Hague tribunal, an investigative magistrate in the Pristina County Court, Danica Marinkovic, today said in Kosovska Mitrovica. However, she added, this evidence had not been used in the proceedings [against Limaj], which resulted in his acquittal two weeks ago. In an interview...

December 14, 2005 Serbian arguments in negotiations on Kosovo and Metohija Nova Srpska Politicka Misao, Belgrade Monday, December 05, 2005 Sanda Raskovic-Ivic Chief of the Coordination Center for Kosovo and Metohija The constitutional name of the southern Serbian province is Kosovo and Metohija, originating from the word "kos" meaning blackbird and the word "metoh" meaning monastery estate. Kosovo and Metohija comprise slightly over 12 percent of the territory of the Republic of Serbia. It is the cradle of our medieval Serbian state, and the location of the seat of the Patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Kosovo and Metohija has...

13 December 2005 – A Romanian Special Police Unit working under the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) came under fire yesterday during an unsuccessful prison breakout by 14 inmates in the western part of the province, which the world body has administered since 1999. There were no casualties, but two vehicles were hit by gunfire, a UN spokesman said today. Within the prison, staff managed to reassert control after initially being overpowered. Simultaneously, however, the Romanian Unit was shot at by unknown persons. Police are investigating the events both inside and outside the prison. The UN has...

Below we have posted an analysis of what happened in Srebrenica, written by Carlos Martins Branco, a Portuguese military officer who served in Bosnia as a UNMO (UN Military Observers) Deputy Chief Operations Officer in the UNPF (UN Peace Forces) at theatre level. Meaning he knew a whole lot about what was happening on the ground. Branco argues that the extremist Bosnian Muslim leadership made it easy for Serbian forces to re-take Srebrenica in 1995, setting the stage to sell the world a false massacre story, with the purpose of isolating the Bosnian Serbs, internationally. He argues that it was...

here's a reason for the conspicuous three-year near silence by all major media on this oh-so-momentous Second Nuremberg, as it was billed — a silence broken only one or two days a year, when they're finally able to offer up a damning piece of evidence that will perpetuate the version of events we've been sold from the beginning. What even the most sporadic trial observer would know is that the Court has spent the last three years discovering what many of us knew in 1999: Milosevic was "a thug whose brutality played into the terrorists' hands," as former Boston Herald...

The Serbian province of Kosovo, largely populated by the Albanian majority, has failed to meet basic human rights and political standards set as prerequisites by the international community, but it should nevertheless enter - in the months to come - talks on its future status. This basic conclusion of the long-awaited report by UN special envoy Kai Eide was approved by the UN secretary general Kofi Annan and fully supported by the EU and the US. But it fails to demystify the paradox. From a legal point of view, Kosovo is an integral part of the sovereign state of Serbia...

What took so long for it to become obvious that Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans are the launching pad for terrorist attacks in Europe? The Washington Post writes on 1 December, "Terrorist Cells Find Foothold in Balkans." What a revelation! The fact is, Bosnia became a launching pad as far back as 1992 when the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic - the government that was supported by the Clinton administration - issued a passport to Osama bin Laden which he used to visit Bosnia and Kosovo on several occasions. More and more newspapers are finally beginning to...

Things look promising in Kosovo, despite the tender ministrations of the United Nations. -------------------------------------------------- Prishtina, Kosovo SOME OF THE FRESHEST and most distinctive voices of "new Europe"--Donald Rumsfeld's term for the former-Communist states that have joined the reunited continent as ardent supporters of capitalism, democracy, and other conservative values--are sounding off in a place so new, in its own way, that less than a decade ago most Americans had never heard of it: Kosovo. Isolated by the Albanian language, an ancient Indo-European tongue with no obvious relatives, as well as by the long-standing hostility of their rapacious neighbors, the Kosovars...

CAMP BONDSTEEL, KOSOVO (Army News Service, Dec 8, 2005) – Families of U.S. troops in the Kosovo Force have donated clothing and school supplies to an elementary school in a small mountainside village. In the village of Ukzmajl, Kosovo, 600 Euro dollars, or $750 USD is the yearly budget allotted by the municipality for the Skenderbeu School. Aware of the scarcity of funding for the school, Kosovo Force Soldiers and their families decided to do something to help out. Eight soldiers from the Headquarters and Headquarters Operations Company, 628th Military Intelligence Battalion, 28th Infantry Division from Harrisburg, Pa., visited the...

Albania Seizes Assets Of Bin Laden Associate TIRANA (AP)--The Albanian government has seized the assets and bank accounts of a man who allegedly worked with Osama bin Laden and others to provide support to terror networks in Albania, the Finance Ministry said Wednesday. Abdul Latif Saleh, who holds Jordanian and Albanian citizenship, was placed on a U.N. sanctions list in September, requiring all U.N. members to impose a travel ban on him and block his assets. Albania earlier had blocked 33 bank accounts in three commercial banks as well as assets and investments in Saleh's businesses and civic organizations he...

www.slobodan-milosevic.org - December 6, 2005 Written by: Andy Wilcoxson The trial of Slobodan Milosevic continued at the Hague Tribunal on Tuesday. Lt. Col. Janos Sel's cross-examination did not continue as scheduled. No explanation was given for that change. Instead, the tribunal heard the continuation of the testimony of Gen. Krsman Jelic, the commander of the 243rd Armored Brigade of the Yugoslav Army, stationed in the Urosevac area of Kosovo. The witness gave evidence refuting the indictment's charges relating to alleged crimes in: Kotlina, Dubrava, Kacanik, Slatina, Stagovo, and Urosevac. In Kotlina, the indictment alleges that Serbian troops massacred civilian men...

The outgoing commander of international peacekeepers in Bosnia says the two top indicted war crimes suspects are very unlikely to be arrested soon. Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his former top general Ratko Mladic have been on the run for 10 years, accused of genocide. British Major-General David Leakey has been commanding the EU's largest ever peacekeeping mission for the past year. He is handing over command to his Italian successor on Tuesday. General Leakey said coordinated international action had now made it virtually impossible for Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to move around freely. The EU peacekeeping...

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia Portions of southern Yugoslavia have reached such a state of ethnic friction that Yugoslavs have begun to talk of the horrifying possibility of ''civil war'' in a land that lost one-tenth of its population, or 1.7 million people, in World War II. The current hostilities pit separatist-minded ethnic Albanians against the various Slavic populations of Yugoslavia and occur at all levels of society, from the highest officials to the humblest peasants. A young Army conscript of ethnic Albanian origin shot up his barracks, killing four sleeping Slavic bunkmates and wounding six others. The army says it has uncovered...

Tribunal Update Tribunal home Kosovo Jubilant at KLA Acquittals Kosovo’s majority Albanian population welcomes result of Hague tribunal’s first case against former guerrillas. By Janet Anderson in The Hague (TU No 432, 2-Dec-05) The streets of Pristina erupted with flags, horns and celebratory gunfire on December 1 as news spread that the Hague tribunal had acquitted two of the first three members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, ever to face trial there for war crimes. Judges in The Hague sentenced one former foot soldier, Haradin Bala, to 13 years in prison for his role in a KLA prison camp...

Kosovo: Clinton 'lied, people died'? ________________________________________ Posted: December 1, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Laurence A. Elder The White House – finally – began pushing back against irresponsible charges that Bush "lied" to the American people in making the case for war. The garrulous Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., made many "Bush lied" accusations: "There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January [2003] to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud." And Kennedy later intoned on the Senate...