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-- 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...

Visiting Speaker of Bosnia's House of Representatives Nikola Spiric leading a parliamentary delegation conferred here Sunday with Majlis Speaker Gholam-ali Haddad Adel on expansion of parliamentary cooperation between the two countries. According to the Press Bureau and Public Relations Department of Majlis, at the meeting, Haddad Adel expressed the hope that the current visit of Bosnian parliamentary delegation would result in all-out expansion of mutual cooperation mainly in parliamentary affairs. Referring to Iran's economic and commercial capabilities, he voiced the readiness of the Iranian government and Majlis to expand relations between the two countries. Given the restoration of peace and...

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,...

Recently, Ivan Bacak, a Croat member of the Bosnian Defense and Security Board, published a text on Serbianna website, “Consultations, compromise and consensus”, which proposes the "magic formula" for peace in Bosnia. In it, Ivan Bacak invites Bosnian Serb leadership for reform talks that will set the agenda for a post-Dayton Bosnia. ... Q: Do you think that a separate Croat entity is, as Djapic says, unsustainable and too small? Ivan Bacak: I don't know how big or small it is because if we agree that there are entities, and I think that's reality, Croats should have their own entity...

Friday, February 03, 2006 - 05:35 PM TUNIS, (SANA) The Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mustafa Ceric called on Friday for standing by Syria in the face of pressures put on her. “ What Syria is exposed to and what is going on in Iraq and Palestine disturb us in the west,” the Mufti said in an interview with Tunisian al-Shorok newspaper, adding: “There would be no peace in the west without the realization of peace in the east.” “What the world had offered to Jerusalem during 50 years of occupation?” the Mufti inquired, indicating that the city of...

Taking the plan's provisions as a starting point, the Transnistrian "experts" and "political analysts", as well as their Moscow and Kiev colleagues who back them, reason the resemblance between Kosovo and the Transnistrian conflict. Note: a Russian polit-technologist, Stanislav Belkovskiy, stated that the Republic of Moldova, or, as he said, Bessarabia, is a non-viable state, infected with the unionist virus, and which and dreams with open eyes about how to get into Romania's arms more quickly. Unlike "Bessarabia", Belkovskiy wrote, Transnistria has set up not only a viable statehood, but also (!) "a Transnistrian nation", who has the right to...

At his massive annual press conference on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed his earlier statements that if Kosovo were to be granted independence, he would support applying the same principle to separatist states in Georgia. Under the argument that "principles have to be universal" the president said independence for Kosovo could justly be used as a model for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. He had first commented on the "universality" of the Kosovo model a day before at a Russian governmental meeting and instructed his foreign minister to pursue this policy. On Tuesday, he made his point even clearer by...

SARAJEVO, Feb 2 (Reuters) - A Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect whose wife was killed in a shootout with European Union soldiers during his arrest in January is to go free on a legal technicality, Bosnia's state court said on Thursday. For the moment, Dragomir Abazovic is still in hospital because he shot himself in the head during the operation, in which his 11 year-old son was also wounded, allegedly while firing back at EUFOR troops along with his mother. Abazovic was indicted in 2002 for war crimes against Muslims in his home area of Rogatica in eastern Bosnia during...

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...

GRACANICA -- Wednesday – Telekom Serbia has reported that Serbian enclaves in Central Kosovo have lost their stationary and mobile phone services as well. Many of these Serbian communities have already been without electricity for several days. According to Telekom, equipment has been damaged in Gracanica, stating that cables have been severed in the region and expert teams are doing everything they can in order to rectify the telecommunications situation as soon as possible. Kosovo Serb leader Randjel Nojkic said that workers of the Kosovo Transport and Telecommunications Ministry cut down all the cables connecting the village Susica, near Gracanica....