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Ten Serb policemen accused of having carried out one of the worst massacres in the Kosovo war may soon face justice.By an investigative team in Belgrade and Pristina In the next few days an investigation will be launched against a group of Serbian policemen suspected of having killed 57 members of an Albanian family in Kosovo in spring 1999, Balkan Insight has learned from sources close to the Serbian prosecutor's war crimes office. The slaughter took place in the midst of NATO's air war against Serb forces in Kosovo, which forced them to withdraw from the province that summer. The...

Srebrenica massacre tape has at last forced Belgrade to face up to its war atrocities For 10 years they have not slept easy. The casual killers of the six cowed and beaten prisoners from Srebrenica were happy to play to the camera that day in July 1995, high on victory and heroes in the eyes of many fellow Serbs. But, as the years have worn on, that sheen has dimmed and the fear has grown. Did the tape still exist? Who had it? Where was it? For the first time since the execution video was shown at the UN's war...

Agencies in Belgrade Friday June 3, 2005 The Guardian They are the images that have finally, 10 years later, shocked a nation. A man, several men, are unloaded from a truck, marched to a wooded hillside and shot, one by one, in the back. Two prisoners are ordered to carry the bodies to a barn. They too are then executed. The murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 is well documented. But a video that emerged this week during the trial of the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, has provoked a bout of soul-searching...

Kosovo: Current and Future Status R. Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary for Political Affairs Statement before the House Committee on International Relations Washington, DC May 18, 2005 Introduction Chairman Hyde, Congressman Lantos, distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you to discuss the current situation in Kosovo and our vision for progress and peace there in the coming months. 2005 is an important year for the people of the Balkans. They and we will commemorate on July 11 the tenth anniversary of the horrible massacre at Srebrenica where nearly 8,000 men and boys were killed....

BELGRADE, May 12 (Reuters) - Most Serbs still do not believe their forces committed atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, a senior United States diplomat said on Thursday, so the idea of holding war crimes trials in the country is problematic. Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia are all trying to show their capacity to deal with the past after the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, insisting they are ready and able to dispense justice for war crimes cases at home. U.S. charge d'affaires Roderick Moore, speaking at a seminar in Belgrade, said Serbs widely failed to recognise...

US Joins in Coordinated Moves on Balkans War Crimes Fugitives By David Gollust State Department 16 December 2004 The international community Thursday announced new measures against Bosnian Serb officials for failing to hand over indicted Balkans war crimes figures to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague. They include targeted sanctions by the United States. The coordinated action by the United States, the International High Representative for Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown, and European Union peacekeepers in Bosnia reflects international frustration that key Balkans war crimes figures remain at large. Mr. Ashdown, international overseer of the 1995 Dayton accords on the Balkans conflict,...

In the first formal meeting since the wars of Yugoslav secession, the leaders of Serbia and Croatia met yesterday to apologise for "all the evils" committed during the conflict, Europe's worst since the Second World War.President Svetozar Marovic of Serbia and Montenegro and President Stjepan Mesic of Croatia met in Belgrade in the first official visit between the former Balkan enemies since the 1991-5 wars.   President Svetozar Marovic of Serbia and Montenegro [left] with President Stjepan Mesic of Croatia Their reconciliation was all the more poignant given the relationship between the godfathers of the wars, the then Yugoslav leader,...

UMM QASR, Iraq (AP) - Two Iraqi soldiers who said they were sent on a suicide attack mission to the country's largest port have turned themselves in to British troops, the British commander said Tuesday. ``We had two suicide bombers turn themselves in yesterday because they didn't want to be suicide bombers any more,'' Col. Steve Cox, commander of the Royal Marine Commandos running Umm Qasr, told reporters. ``We are accommodating them.'' The pair had no explosives in their possession when they surrendered, Cox said, adding that they were turned over to British military intelligence for interrogation and would be...

Even as NATO quarrels about how to deal with one bloody tyrant, another is trying to turn his war-crimes trial in The Hague into a circus   THE trial of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's former strongman, had its first anniversary this week, but the only person who seemed in a mood to celebrate was the defendant himself. Mr Milosevic may be facing 66 separate charges of the gravest crimes imaginable, including genocide, at the UN's war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, but he appears to be enjoying himself nevertheless. Berating or bullying prosecution witnesses with relish, and peppering the judges with objections,...

There's growing evidence that Greece helped to lubricate Milosevic's war machineBy Takis Michas in AthensAs Greece prepares to take on the mantle of the European Union presidency in January 2003, the time has come for Athens to examine the role it played in aiding the regimes of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb associates Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic.Besides a general failure to confront the scale of war crimes perpetrated by Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces during the Nineties, there's mounting evidence of Greek complicity in Yugoslav sanction-busting during the conflicts. A recent report published by the...

Serbia: Census Deal Resolves Presevo Crisis Hardliners among Serbs and Albanians have lost out in southern Serbia, where a remarkable political deal has dampened down the fires of ethnic conflictBy Jim Adams in Presevo, southern Serbia (BCR No 331, 17-Apr-02)Moderate ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia have marginalised former guerrilla commanders in the region through an historic decision to switch their allegiance from Kosovo to Belgrade. In what many see as a political milestone, local Albanian leaders in the Party for Democratic Action, PDD, and Party for Democratic Union, PDU, agreed to take part in Serbia's nationwide census later this month.The...

The Russians now admit no other vessel was involvedBy the BBC's Russian affairs analyst Stephen Dalziel The spirit of the Soviet Union is alive and well, and living in the headquarters of the Russian Navy. That became apparent when news first came through in August 2000 that the pride of the Northern Fleet, the giant nuclear submarine Kursk, had been involved in an accident. According to the naval high command, the Kursk had "encountered difficulties", and had been allowed "to drift to the sea bed". As more information emerged about the accident, this official version of events began to look ...

1 German Suicide 6/17/1999 In Macedonia 2 British Mine Clearing 6/21/1999 Lt. Garath Evans 3 Gurkha Mine Clearing 6/21/1999 Sgt. Balaram Rai 4 Italian Weapons discharge 6/24/1999 5 American Road Accident 7/4/1999 First (In FYROM) 6 American Road Accident 7/18/1999 7 American Road Accident 7/18/1999 8 American Suicide 7/29/1999 Spec Igor Katz 9 American Electrocution 8/2/1999 earlier, 2 road deaths, 1 accidental shooting (in Kosovo) 10 Greek Weapons discharge 9/13/1999 Sergeant Anastasios Dinakis 11 Turkish Mine Clearing 9/22/1999 Huseyin Kutlu 12 American Parachute Malfunction 10/1/1999 Sgt. Jason Pringle 13 German Road Accident 10/12/1999 ? 14 German Road Accident 10/12/1999 ...

Enduring and Surviving: Republika Srpska Between 2001 & 2002 On the eve of a year in which, according to current trends, there will be plenty of everything except money and easy living, the main question is do we have anything to look forward to at all. Maybe we should go back to looking forward to the year 2001, when we cannot do that with 1990, a year from which neither locals nor the foreigners have learned anything. AIM Banja Luka, December 20, 2001 Only 2002 -- another year with two zeros, as RS Premier Mladen Ivanic put it in a ...

The story starts: February 24, 1995. Having met the requirements stipulated under North Carolina Law, Greg Dority, #13 is issued a Security Guard and Patrol license. For whatever reason (see Simon Winchester passage), Greg finds himself in Albania, and makes the acquaintance of Shaun Going, who makes the news by being arrested with his cousin and two UNMIK police officers on their way back to Kosovo from Montenegro. Maclean's Magazine, in Canada, does a story on Shaun Going, and Greg Dority is quoted in the article: "Shaun took responsibility and helped his Albanian workers escape," says Greg Dority, head of ...

Pashtun Backlash Pashtuns in northern Pakistan angered by the ill-treatment and disappearance of locals who volunteered for the Taleban are taking it out on Afghan refugees sheltering in the region.By Muhammad Rasheed in Dir (RCA No. 86, 20-Nov-01)Afghan refugees face a backlash from Pashtuns in northern Pakistan furious that many among the thousands of local volunteers who last month went to fight on the side of the Taleban are now feared dead.People in the border town of Dir, around 240 km north of Peshawar, in Malakand, North West Frontier Province, NWFP, were horrified to hear about the ill-treatment and ...

Stanislav Galic and Dragomir Milosevic - Initial Indictment THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA CASE NO: IT-98-29-I THE PROSECUTOR OF THE TRIBUNAL AGAINST STANISLAV GALIC DRAGOMIR MILOSEVIC   INDICTMENT The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, pursuant to her authority under Article 18 of the Statute of the Tribunal charges: STANISLAV GALIC and DRAGOMIR MILOSEVIC with CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY and VIOLATIONS OF THE LAWS AND CUSTOMS OF WAR as set forth below: BACKGROUND: 1.	Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina and is situated on an east-to-west axis along the Miljacka River valley in ...

Uproar over Film "Storm over Krajina" AIM Zagreb, October 4, 2001 Bozo Knezevic’s documentary "Storm over Krajina" - produced by an independent Zagreb producer, Factum - was finally shown on Croat state TV, on the show "Latin Letters" aired at prime time, eight in the evening, October 1. The fifty-minute-long film depicts the executions of civilians in the villages of Grubori, Varivode, Gosici and Plavno in the course of operation "Storm". For the most part, the film deals with the executions of, by rule, elderly men and women in the said villages, but the opening sequences are a political overture ...

COMMENT: Where Is Ivan? Bitter friends and family accuse the authorities of failing to investigate a crime at the heart of an evil system.By Petar Lukovic in Belgrade (BCR NO. 275, 29-Aug-01)"Thanks to these Serbian gentlemen, Ivan's blood is unified with the blood of the children murdered in Srebrenica, with that of Vukovar and Sarajevan children killed by sniper fire. I see Ivan in these children. Ivan is one of them. Killed children, one whole nation of children."Ivan, of course, is Ivan Stambolic, the Yugoslav leader who disappeared one year ago this weekend. In a speech this May, marking ...

Croatia's Million Man No-Show Warnings of a right-wing coup were overstated, as a massive anti-government rally is cancelled due to lack of interest.By Dragutin Hedl in Osijek (BCR No. 275, 29-Aug-01)Croatia's resurgent nationalist right suffered its severest recent setback last week, when a planned million-strong protest rally was cancelled, owing to the organisers' fears that the expected level of support would not materialise.The "Assembly of All Croats" was due to take place on August 24 at Znjan, near Split, a site hallowed by nationalists as the place where Pope John Paul II began his historic visit to the newly ...