Free Republic

Although temperatures in the Balkans are rising, neither budding flowers nor mass protests should be mistaken for the beginning of a Balkan Spring modeled on the revolutions that rocked the Arab world in 2011. The protesters’ main problem is that they’re unable to apply any political pressure on the government by rallying around a candidate that might threaten Vucic’s stranglehold on national politics. The entirety of the anti-Vucic ideological spectrum is represented—from student Marxists to Bosko Obradovic, the ultranationalist leader of Dveri, a far-right opposition party of religious conservatives—sometimes causing scuffles among the protesters. This highlights the fragmented and impotent...

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — A high-ranking U.S. envoy has urged Serbia and Kosovo to stop provoking each other and to resume their discussions over how to normalize relations between the two former wartime foes. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale, who met with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, also called Friday on Kosovo to lift a 100 percent tariff on Serbian goods so that European Union-mediated talks can resume.

Anti-government protesters in their thousands took to the streets of Belgrade on Saturday night for the tenth weekly demonstration of its kind. The protesters are a mix of citizens movements, opposition parties, from both left and right, academics, students and ordinary people. They are united in the belief that Serbia with president Aleksandar Vucic at the helm is sliding towards autocratic rule and that the country is gripped by political violence and a climate of fear. After more than two months of weekly protests people are still coming out in huge numbers and many political analysts believe the protests are...

BELGRADE – Weekly protest walks, taking place since 8 December 2018, have become the most serious challenge to the rule of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic so far. The protests, which are supported but not formally organised by the opposition parties, have spread to more than 20 cities and towns across the country... One of the protests took place in Kosovska Mitrovica, the largest city of the Serb-majority Northern Kosovo, which is governed by Vucic’s political allies. The protests, organised under the title “One of the five million” (a reference to the initial reaction of President Vucic, in which he said...

Tens of thousands of people have been gathering every weekend to march against what they call the climate of “political violence” in Serbia created under the rule of President Aleksandar Vucic and his governing Serbian Progressive Party. The so-called “1 of 5 million” protests started on December 8, 2018. They were triggered by an incident a few weeks earlier on November 23, when an opposition politician, Borko Stefanovic, was attacked and beaten in the southern town of Krusevac. Initially, the protests were held only in Belgrade. But in January, people in more than 30 Serbian cities and towns joined in...

The road to the Red Cross Concentration Camp is caked in frozen mud etched with tire tracks and cracking puddles. A dog jogs ahead to dig holes in the camp’s yard. The barbed-wire fence lies in a decrepit heap next to the ticket office branded with a faded swastika and, in thick capital letters, “WACHE SS”.Also, there’s also a high school next door.“Many tourists ask, ‘Oh, is this also part of the camp?’ No, it’s just a school,” explains our guide, Aleksandra Zdravkovic. She works at the tourism office of Nis, a quiet city of 190,000 in southern Serbia, and...

- The Yugoslav Wars started in 1991, but never really ended. - Kosovo and Serbia are still enemies, and they're getting worse. - A proposed land swap could create peace – or reignite the conflict. The government of Serbia has made its peace and established diplomatic relations with all other former Yugoslav countries, but not with Kosovo. In Serbian eyes, Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 was a unilateral and therefore legally invalid change of state borders. Despite their current conflict, Kosovo and Serbia have the same long-term objective: Membership of the European Union. Ironically, that wish could lead to...

The Trump administration is working to score what it hopes to be another foreign policy win, this time by encouraging leaders from Serbia and Kosovo to sign a peace agreement in a ceremony that could take place at the White House. Trump recently sent letters to both Thaci and Serb President Aleksandar Vucic, asking they accelerate negotiations in an effort to resolve their impasse. As first reported in the Washington Post, Thaci and Vucic published their versions of the Trump letter online. “Failure to capi­tal­ize on this unique opportunity would be a tragic setback, as another chance for a comprehensive...

By April 1992, with its Soviet ally freshly dissolved, Yugoslavia as the world had known it was gone in a bloody and violent breakup, leaving some 100,000 dead, 2.4 million refugees, 2 million internally displaced, and seven independent nations in its place. While those ethnic tensions still simmer in much of the former Yugoslavia, so too is a growing sentimental recollection of life in a country much of the younger generations can only learn about in history books and museums like Milakovic’s Yugodom. A Gallup poll from last year showed that many people in the former Yugoslavia look back fondly...

Photo of the Serbian and American flags flying at Serbian National Defense headquarters in Chicago by Aleksandra Rebic July 2018. The Significance of JULY 28 in Serbian-American History / WWI begins and America formally honors Serbia as an Ally, paying tribute to her contributions and sacrifice.Aleksandra's Note: Today, July 28, 2018, marks two important anniversaries. On this date in 1914 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, thus beginning what would turn into the First World War. On this date in 1918, exactly one century ago, the Serbian flag flew at the White House in Washington, D.C. at the request of American...

PODGORICA (Reuters) - Perched atop massive cement pillars that tower above Montenegro’s picturesque Moraca river canyon, scores of Chinese workers are building a state-of-the-art highway through some of the roughest terrain in southern Europe. The government has described the 165 km (103 mile) highway, with its imposing bridges and deep-cut tunnels, as the construction of the century and a pathway to the modern world. It is designed to link the port of Bar on Montenegro’s Adriatic coast to landlocked neighbor Serbia. But once the first, challenging 41 km stretch through mountains north of the capital is completed, the government faces...

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stood firm on mass migration during a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin Thursday, saying that his country would refuse to allow Germany to send migrants back to Hungary. Chancellor Merkel described the meeting saying that Mr Orbán claimed Hungary felt, “not at all responsible for the processing of asylum applications”, and looked to countries like Greece to take responsibility for processing asylum claims instead, Der Spiegel reports. The German leader added that the federal government could not see Europe “decouple” itself from asylum seekers and legitimate refugees but noted that the two leaders did find common...

Federal authorities on Wednesday began legal proceedings to strip U.S. citizenship from two Bosnians, including one living in Oregon, for war crimes including executing civilians during that country’s civil war in the 1990s. The move by the U.S. Justice Department comes years after Rasema Handanovic and Edin Dzeko were extradited and later convicted by courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2011. After serving her sentence, Handanovic returned to Beaverton, Oregon, according to a statement from the Justice department, while Dzeko has not yet been released by Bosnian authorities. The department filed denaturalization lawsuits against the pair in federal courts in...

A mother looking for her 14-year-old girl who was abducted in Afrin under invasion, stated that dozens of girls are held captive and raped by Turkish forces and allied gangs. The Turkish state and gangs are committing a war crime against women and girls in Afrin which is under their invasion. A mother who revealed the savagery while looking for her 14-year-old missing girl says; “What was done in Shengal is being done here now. The whole world must see this vileness.” Invasion attacks of the Turkish state and jihadist gangs derived from ISIS and Al-Qaeda against Afrin Canton of...

More than 3,000 Serbs came together on Saturday at the Serbian Orthodox Church’s official ceremony in honor of the victims of the 1999 NATO bombing in Yugoslavia. The victims were remembered throughout the country, but the main ceremony took place in the town of Aleksinac in southern Serbia, often known as “Serbian Hiroshima,” reports the Serbian Orthodox Church. On the day of the 19th anniversary of the tragedy, His Grace Bishop Arseny of Niš served a panikhida in memory of all the victims and offered a homily. The clergy and representatives of the president of the republic laid flowers at...

On July 28th 1918, the 4th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, Serbian flag flew above the White House and all public buildings in American capital by the order of President Woodrow Wilson. This unique event, a Serbian flag flying above the White House in Washington, took place over 9 decades ago but remained a memorable act of the US President Woodrow Wilson towards Serbia that submitted the ultimate sacrifice in “The Great War” – it lost 26% of its population and had a precedent in the war history when almost its entire population had to withdraw from their homeland.One of...

Then came the month of March, the harbinger of spring. For many in the world this is a month of joy, but for the Serbs it is a painful reminder. In March 1999, NATO's criminal snake unjustly attacked then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The attack on Yugoslavia dealt a criminal blow to the Serbs and Serbia. The incessant genocide All the poison they had and the radioactive bombs NATO brought down on the Serbian villages and cities. They poisoned rivers, fields and meadows. The forests withered from the dumped poison. The number of cancer cases of women, children, men has...

A former president of Serbia predicted Friday that a municipal election in Belgrade this weekend won't be conducted fairly and he criticized the European Union for tolerating what he called the undemocratic policies of the Balkan state's current leader. Boris Tadic alleged in an interview with The Associated Press that the EU has been unwilling to confront President Aleksander Vucic because he promised to resolve the status of Kosovo, the former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008.

The United States is still unsure who directed a February 7 attack on US and US-backed forces in Syria, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Saturday, even as he acknowledged accounts that Russian civilian contractors were involved. Reuters has reported that about 300 men working for a Kremlin-linked Russian private military firm were either killed or injured in Syria. The US has estimated about 100 pro-Syrian government forces were killed by US strikes to repel the Febuary 7 attack. Russian military officers told the United States during the incident that Moscow was not involved. The Pentagon has declined to comment...

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — During the Cold War, the MiG-21 fighter and the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle epitomized the might of the Soviet Bloc as it confronted the West in Europe. Although the MiG-21 — dubbed Fishbed by NATO — never saw combat in a NATO-Warsaw Pact war, the most iconic Soviet fighter of the jet age frequently tangled with American and other Western warplanes in hot wars in Vietnam, the Middle East and Africa. But nearly 60 years after it first entered front-line service with the Soviet air force — and 33 years since production ceased — the single-engine interceptor...