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The defence lawyers assigned to ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic have asked for the former NATO commander General Wesley Clark to be recalled to the witness stand for further questioning. Clark testified in December 2003, during the prosecution stage of the Milosevic trial. He told the court that he spoke with the accused following the massacre of Muslim prisoners from the town of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb troops in 1995, and was led to believe that Milosevic had known in advance what would happen. He also gave evidence about Milosevic’s relationship with Serbs in Bosnia in the early Nineties and spoke...

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Authorities are monitoring up to 250 Arab Muslims who fought in Bosnia's 1992-95 war, including some who are suspected of having links to international terrorism, a top police official said Thursday. Zlatko Miletic, director of police for the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia, told reporters that the Muslims under surveillance all live in or around the northeastern village of Gornja Maoca, where they settled after the war. Miletic said the Muslims were among 740 who obtained Bosnian passports during or just after the war, and that the names of nine men appeared on Egypt's list of most-wanted terror...

Macedonia's Muslims are likely to elect a moderate leader soon, but extremism persists. By Christopher Deliso | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor SKOPJE, MACEDONIA – For Muslims in this small Balkan country, the Ottoman Empire's Islamic legacy still endures. However, some say Arab rivals are seeking to undermine it. "When my cousin entered university in Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis offered him 200 euros a month and an apartment if he would spread their customs back in Macedonia," says Blerim, a young ethnic Albanian and Muslim who didn't want to give his last name for security reasons. "He accepted, and...

The Srebrenica operation was planned so that Bosnian Serb forces were positioned in a shape of a horseshoe, thus intentionally leaving space for the Muslim army and civilians to retreat North, North-West towards Tuzla. The distance of 36km and the configuration of the terrain are such that any man in average physical condition can cross it on foot. The military operation was conducted in this manner with the intention of minimizing the number of casualties, since the Muslims had brought in substantial military forces. If the Muslim forces had been hermetically enclosed, a violent fight would have ensued in which...

When various Balkan potentates come to Washington, you can guess their ethnicity by the kind of treatment they receive. Albanian terrorists like the KLA leader Hashim Thaci do rather well. They are received at the State Department, which but a decade ago would have deemed them untouchable. They have full access to the mainstream media and publically-funded think-tanks to propagate independence for their mono-ethnic criminal fiefdom. When Bishop Artemije of Rashka and Prizren, the spiritual leader of Kosovo’s beleaguered Serbs, comes to Washington, he stays with friends in suburban Maryland who drive him hundreds of miles to meetings in Chicago,...

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Serbia's president proposed on Tuesday a 20-year grace period before deciding Kosovo's final status, a suggestion quickly dismissed by Kosovo's prime minister and Europeans. The dispute at a Security Council meeting on Kosovo illustrated the chasm between the two sides just days before long-awaited U.N.-organized talks begin in Vienna on Monday on the future of the Serbian province. Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since NATO bombs drove out Serb forces in 1999 during a campaign of ethnic cleansing under former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Serbian President Boris Tadic offered Kosovo wide...

Judge Patrick Robinson immediately shut down a Western journalist on the Hague Tribunal witness stand last week, when she disclosed having seen Osama bin Laden waltz into the office of late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic in November 1994. Just as veteran British journalist Eve-Ann Prentice, who covered the Yugoslav conflicts for the Guardian and the Times told of the famous OBL, Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice objected, and the judge “…cut off the testimony immediately declaring it ‘irrelevant,’” according to the defense’s recap of a devastating day of testimony. full article

-- Giving the Kosovo region independence would encourage terrorism and jihadists inside Europe that rival al-Qaida, the bishop of Kosovo warned Saturday. Artemije Radosavljevic, who heads the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo, spoke to more than 100 members of St. Sava Cathedral in Parma on Saturday afternoon. Though his visit featured typical gestures of goodwill and bonding -- traditional dances by the church's youth and a banquet of Serbian food like kielbasa and cabbage -- Bishop Artemije gave the crowd the same pleas that he is making in Pittsburgh and Chicago on his nearly two-week trip across the United States....

BELGRADE -- Monday - Serbian Radical Party senior official Tomislav Nikolic said that he and Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica agreed that any eventual proclamation of independence in Kosovo would represent an occupation of Serbia. Kostunica and Nikolic met over the weekend to talk about Kosovo. After the meeting, Nikolic said that Kosovo independence would be considered an occupation of Serbian territory. “Faced with the talks of Kosovo independence which the English Diplomat (John Sawyers) has begun, we agreed that if it ever got to the point where Kosovo was declared independent, the Serbian Parliament would adopt a resolution which...

BERLIN, FEBRUARY 13: A moving drama about Bosnia's post-war trauma and the lingering impact of the systematic rape of Bosnian women by Serb soldiers won cheers at its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Sunday. Grbavica spotlights a hushed-up topic of mass rapes in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo with a tear-jerking story of a Muslim woman who tries to hide the grisly truth of the past to protect her daughter. The film, seen by critics as one of the Berlinale's best so far, is told against the backdrop of Sarajevo's struggle to come to terms with...

(CNN) -- The war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic enters its fifth tedious year Sunday, and though international interest in the tribunal has waned, it has proved a useful tool in educating Serbs. "Its greatest reverberation is in Serbia itself," where regional media have brought the crimes to center stage by airing and reporting on the proceedings, said Edgar Chen of the Coalition for International Justice, a group that supports war crimes tribunals. Milosevic is charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in last decade's bloody Balkans conflict, and for four years, he has dragged out judicial...

Nikolic said the Serbian parliament would hold a session on Kosovo after the start of the talks. He asserted that no politician in Serbia would accept Kosovo independence. "If someone declares an independent Kosovo ... we will declare that an occupation and use all means to revoke that state of occupation," Nikolic said. There was no immediate comment from Kostunica. He and Serbia's President Boris Tadic also have rejected independence for Kosovo. Serbian leaders were angered by recent comments by a visiting senior British diplomat quoted as saying that Kosovo eventually would win independence from Serbia.

BELGRADE - More than a thousand people on Friday took to the streets of Novi Pazar, southern Serbia, protesting against the blasphemous caricatures published in newspapers in Denmark and other countries, local media reported. “We have assembled today to show that we are ready to defend our Muslim faith, with our tongues and our lives,” a speechmaker said at the rally. The protesters torched a Danish flag, the Beta news agency reported. Novi Pazar is located in the Sandzak region of Serbia-Montenegro, which has a majority Muslim population. The publication of blasphemous caricatures in European newspapers has triggered massive Muslim...

Judge Patrick Robinson immediately shut down a Western journalist on the Hague Tribunal witness stand last week, when she disclosed having seen Osama bin Laden waltz into the office of late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic in November 1994. Just as veteran British journalist Eve-Ann Prentice, who covered the Yugoslav conflicts for the Guardian and the Times told of the famous OBL, Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice objected, and the judge “…cut off the testimony immediately declaring it ‘irrelevant,’” according to the defense’s recap of a devastating day of testimony. However, considering that the defendant, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was trying to...

PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - A senior British diplomat has told Serbs that independence is the best solution for the disputed Serbian province of Kosovo in talks due within days, Serb negotiators said on Tuesday. "[John] Sawers told us the Contact Group had decided Kosovo should be independent. He said Kosovo would be multi-ethnic, but in the end independent," Goran Bogdanovic, a Kosovo Serb, told Belgrade radio B92, after meeting the political director of the British Foreign Office late on Monday. A second Serb negotiator in Belgrade, who attended a meeting between Sawers and the Serbian prime minister on...

By Shaban Buza PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - The United Nations-run province of Kosovo can win independence from Serbia in negotiations this year if it shows enough democratic maturity, a senior British diplomat said on Monday. "The more the leaders of Kosovo can reach out to the other communities and show that Kosovo is a mature democracy, the more fully an independence can be delivered," John Sawers, the political director of the Foreign Office, told reporters after meeting Kosovo Albanian leaders in the capital, Pristina. The comments are in line with what diplomats have been saying in private for...

By SAMIR KRILIC : Associated Press Writer Feb 6, 2006 : 4:19 am ET MOUNT JAHORINA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- In 1984, this ski resort hosted some of the world's top athletes at the Sarajevo Olympics. Just a few years later, notorious war commanders and their troops took shelter here, turning a symbol of harmony into one of ethnic hatred. Today, as another Winter Olympics begins this week in nearby Italy, Jahorina's ski slopes are slowly becoming trails to reconciliation as skiers from all countries of the former Yugoslavia come to ski -- and put the past behind. At bars and cafes,...

Belgrade, Feb 6, IRNA The leader of the Islamic community in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mustafa Ceric, has said that the publishing of cartoons with offensive contents for Muslims in some European countries shows that Europe should be treated for an illness called 'Islamophobia', reported the Croatian news agency HINA. According to the agency, the Bosnian media on Saturday quoted the Islamic dignitary as saying in Sarajevo that 'it is really ugly what kind of messages are being sent these days to Muslims in Europe'. Europe's attitude towards the highest values of Muslims, expressed through a minor newspaper in Denmark, would hardly be...

The trial of Slobodan Milosevic resumed on Friday with the testimony of Ms. Eva Prentice. Ms. Prentice is a British journalist who has covered the Balkans for both The Guardian and the London Times newspapers since the 1980s. Over the course of her career she visited the former Yugoslavia at least forty times. Ms. Prentice testified that she was concerned by non-objective reporting in the Western media. She said that Western politicians and journalists presented the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in terms of good vs. evil. She said that Serbs were demonized and portrayed as evil while Kosovo-Albanians, Croats,...

International pressure on Serbia over the future of Kosovo and the surrender of war criminals is counter-productive and could lead to instability, Vuk Draskovic, Serbia’s foreign minister, warned on Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT “The humiliation of the people of Serbia must be stopped,” Mr Draskovic told the Financial Times while visiting Washington for the annual convention in the US of the National Prayer Breakfast to be hosted by President George W. Bush. Mr Draskovic echoed a warning delivered hours earlier by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, that independence for Kosovo would fuel demands for independence elsewhere, naming Georgia’s provinces of Abkhazia and South...