The Balkan Chronicle

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Former US president George W Bush and British ex-prime minister Tony Blair were Tuesday found guilty at a mock tribunal in Malaysia for committing "crimes against peace" during the Iraq war.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal found the former heads of state guilty after a four-day hearing. A seven-member panel chaired by former Malaysian Federal Court judge Abdul Kadir Sulaiman presided over the trial.

The five panel tribunal unanimously decided that the former US and British leaders had committed crimes against peace and humanity, and also violated international law when they ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

When our world is full of conflict and division over religion and its interpretations Hajj is a beautiful picture of how God can draw all people together.

The classroom was fairly bare – a state college on a low budget couldn’t afford many luxuries.  There were seven or eight of us in the class, our small number dwarfing the room intended for thirty or forty students.  I was the newcomer, coming in during the class’s second term after studying for a term in Egypt.

Our teacher was a well-dressed Moroccan man in his 40s named Ayman with a quiet voice in English but a firm and strong voice in Arabic, the language he was teaching us.  It was the first time the other students had seen him since the previous term and soon after he had walked into the room the questions began: “Tell us about your trip!  What was Makkah like?”

Nothing is lost. The years of your life that you poured like water into a now-failed marriage, or the immense love and attention you gave a child or brother or friend who now treats you like an enemy, or the work you did for a company that closed down, or the sweat you put into a project that ultimately failed... none of that is lost.

It's particularly hard when a relationship collapses, leaving bitterness where previously there was passion. It's galling. You feel confused, betrayed, depressed. Even years later you might feel that you wasted those years, that you poured love from your innermost core and watched it go down a drain.

All over Europe, headlines are declaring that the eurozone is on the verge of collapse.  Many people falsely assume that this will mean the end of the euro and a return to national currencies.  Unfortunately, that is not going to be the case at all.  Instead, this is going to be yet another example of how the elite attempt to bring order out of chaos.  The European elite have no intention on giving up on a united Europe.  Rather, they hope to be able to bring to life a new "United States of Europe" out of the ashes of the existing eurozone.  Over the coming months we will see widespread panic and fear all across Europe.  The euro will likely sink like a rock and there will probably be huge financial problems in Europe and all around the globe.  But for the European elite, a great crisis like this represents a golden opportunity to tear down the existing structures and build new ones.  The solution that the European elite will be pushing will not be to go back to the way that Europe used to be.  Instead, they will be pushing the idea of a much more tightly integrated Europe really hard.

According to the Hungarian Helsinki Watch Serbia cannot be regarded as safe country and their recent report accounts why.

The writing of this report was triggered by a significant increase in the number of asylum seekers returned by the Hungarian authorities to Serbia in 2011. Hungary modified its Asylum Act in December 2010 and introduced the concept of a safe third country among the criteria examined in the admissibility procedure. The result of this amendment is that asylum seekers arriving in Hungary through Serbia can be returned to Serbia without an in-merit examination of their claim. As the application of this concept concerns a significant number of asylum seekers in Hungary, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) decided to examine whether the utilization of the safe third country concept in relation to Serbia is justified.

The report was compiled by using various sources: internet research, a three-day field mission to the Republic of Serbia, participation in a conference in Belgrade and discussions with governmental, non-governmental and international stakeholders.

You could call me a 'matchmaker', said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal organ-trade was revealed. Rosenbaum’s matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says that he buys the kidneys for $10,000, from poor people. He then proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for $160,000. The accusations have shaken the American transplantation business. If they are true it means that organ trafficking is documented for the first time in the US, experts tell the New Jersey Real-Time News.

Fire was set to the Paris offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in the early morning on Wednesday, hours before an issue hit newsstands featuring a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

The issue was renamed "Charia Hebdo," in reference to Sharia law, and was "guest edited" by the Prophet Muhammad. The special issue was produced following the electoral success of the Islamist Ennahda party in the Tunisia. A cartoon image of Muhammad shows a bubble quote of him saying: "100 lashes if you don't die laughing."

Nearly twenty years ago, the country I called home, Bosnia and Herzegovina, descended into a brutally violent and destructive war, one that shredded the fabric of our society and forever altered the lives of the survivors. For the women who lived through the Bosnian War, the atrocities and genocide perpetrated against them was also a war against memory, an attempt to destroy a group of people, hide the evidence, and silence the victims through intimidation or death. But the women did not forget, nor did they remain silent.

Earlier this month, the women of Bosnia and Herzegovina reminded the world that their memories have not faded, and that they will bravely continue to pursue justice. I Came to Testify, the first of the five-part PBS series Women, War, and Peace, shared the stories of the women of Foča, who were forced into rape camps by Serbian military forces, and who stood before the International Criminal Tribunal to face their attackers and tell the world what they had done to them. For the 16 women who came to testify, their victory was more than the triumph of the human spirit over adversity -- their trial redefined how we understand rape in the context of war, and made it possible to prosecute those who rape for war crimes.

In Philadelphia, American and British lawyers have debated the legality of America's founding documents.

On Tuesday night, while Republican candidates in Nevada were debating such American issues as nuclear waste disposal and the immigration status of Mitt Romney's gardener, American and British lawyers in Philadelphia were taking on a far more fundamental topic.

Namely, just what did Thomas Jefferson think he was doing?

When newspapers briefly mentioned that Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu joined in prayer at a mosque in Bosnia during a state visit, I was surprised that the story was not debated in the Turkish press. 
 
This shows how far Turkey has come toward feeling at home in its own skin. There was a time when Muslim Turkish women wearing headscarves were not admitted to events at Turkish embassies. But more than domestic debates on religion and secularism, what we are seeing in Turkey now is a fast-emerging model for the practice of diplomacy in the 21st century.

Volunteer Halima Begum was only 5 when the Bosnia conflict took place. "This is the forgotten massacre," she said, "Young people like me don't even know about it yet it was our brothers and sisters who were killed. I want to go and tell the Bosnian people that they are not forgotten, we are one global community and their suffering will not go unheard."

MADE in Europe launched its Journey programme in 2011 and sent a team of 12 young people to Bosnia & Herzegovina in June/July 2011.

The programme aims to revive the Islamic concept of a journey as an act of learning and enrichment, not just a photo opportunity! And it's not just a physical journey, but a journey of reflection, exploring our motivations for action and contemplating the world around us.

Attention has once again been drawn to the Balkan region, as Serbian war criminal ex-general Ratko Mladić was caught in late May 2011 after 16 years on the run for his role in steering the massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica, with another 10,000 citizens killed or missing in Sarajevo (Bosnia Herzegovina/BiH).

The capture of Mladić has jumpstarted Serbia's stalled EU candidacy talks. However, the issue of Serbia's adamant refusal to recognize Kosovo will inevitably further stagnate the process down the road, delaying Serbia's EU goals.

Meanwhile, Serbia has simmering regional issues that must addressed during the EU process, particularly in terms of domestic regional cohesion for the sake of the country's security, and it can utilize its' budding friendship with Turkey to qualm the (ethnic and economic) woes of its' southern regions.

Almost forty years later: The 5000 page Saville Commission Report into the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland, while calling for compensation to the victims' families, fails to identify who were the perpetrators, both within H.M government and the British Army.

"The North's Public Prosecution Service (PPS) is continuing to scrutinise the Saville report to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to bring charges against British soldiers involved in Bloody Sunday on January 30th, 1972. While progress has been made on the issue of compensation there have been no substantial developments in relation to the possibility of British soldiers being charged. The PPS confirmed yesterday that the 5,000-page report by Lord Saville into Bloody Sunday remains under examination but that it is not yet in a position to rule on whether or not criminal cases can be taken against British soldiers involved in the shootings over 39 years ago." (Irish Times, September 22, 2011)

"STATEMENT OF WORLD SPIRITUAL LEADERS ON THE UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION AND WORLD PEACE ON THE OCCASION OF THE SO-CALLED UN INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEACE ON 21ST SEPTEMBER 2011

The United Nations has lost its entire credibility by endorsing and facilitating wars in the name of peace and democracy instead of protecting human life thus allowing nations to be attacked on the basis that might is right in recent wars such as Iraq and Libya.

The victims of the mid-1990s genocide in Bosnia were allowed to suffer long before Bosnian Serb forces began their massacres, according to a new study of bones from mass graves in the region.

(In the photo is the skull of a victim of the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica. This photo was taken in 2007 at a mass grave exhumed outside of the village of Potocari in Bosnia and Herzegovina.)

According to Statistics Norway (Statistisk sentralbyrå), there are approximately 100 - 185 000 Muslims in Norway. This is between the 2 and 4 percent of the total population. Since there is no official register on religious beliefs among the Norwegian population, the statistics are based on members of religious communities and immigration from countries with Muslim population.

Muslims in Norway cannot be easily noticed in public, except the occasional women passing by on the streets wearing a hijab. Even mosques are not that visible. There are mostly placed in ordinary houses and buildings with little or none outside marks.

We have reported earlier of the possible transfer of the U.S. stealth fighter technology to China from the Serb Army which got its Stealth Bomber F11 during NATO's bombing campaign in 1999, as it was reported by other sources as well.

This will not be the first time for such significant, possibly turning-point, military transfers to originate in the Balkans.

Few people have much sympathy for the rich who have lost millions in the latest share price crash.

But then a new study has revealed the wealthy are unlikely to be to bothered about those who are struggling to make ends meet.

According to psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner the rich are usually self-obsessed and only worried about their own well being.

Keltner said they were 'less empathetic, less altruistic and generally more selfish' as a result of having so much money.

He said they have an 'ideology of self interest' and more likely to think about themselves whereas those less well off were more likely to help others.

The debate between secularists and Islamic groups, a conspicuous feature of Turkish politics for decades, changed in the late 1990s when the political discourse of mainstream Islamic groups embraced secularism. The establishment elite advocate the existing French model of an 'assertive secularism', meaning that, in the public domain, the state supports only the expression of a secular worldview, and formally excludes religion and religious symbols from that domain. The pro-Islamic conservatives, on the other hand, favour the American model of 'passive secularism', in which the state permits the expression of religion in the public domain. In short, what Turkey has witnessed over the last decade is no longer a tussle between secularism and Islamism, but between two brands of secularism.

Researchers may now search and browse the Wellcome Library's Arabic manuscripts using groundbreaking functionalities in a new online resource that brings together rich descriptive information and exceptionally detailed images.

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library's Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes' commentaries on Avicenna's medical poetry.