The Balkan Chronicle

Pera Milankov is literally paying people to stay and have babies in Nova Crnja.

Trying to stem a declining birthrate and exodus out of the town on Serbia's northern border, the mayor has offered free school buses and free medical check-ups for children, as well as 200 euros for every newborn.

To no avail. Since 2002, Nova Crnja has lost 20 percent of its population, or almost 2,500 people, driven away by the closure of processing plants for sugar and sunflower oil, an ethanol producer and factories for meat and canned foods.

Twenty-five soldiers serving with the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo and dozens of ethnic Serbians have reportedly been injured in clashes over roadblocks set up by Serbs in northern Kosovo.

A spokesman for the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) said two of the NATO personnel -- a German commander and a soldier -- were shot by Serbs who fired small arms in the November 28 violence. The other injured soldiers are said to include Germans and Austrians.

A Bosnian Serb former soldier was charged on Tuesday with the murder of Muslim detainees and the rape and torture of women held in a hotel in the eastern town of Visegrad during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

The Balkan country's war crimes court confirmed charges filed by prosecutors against Oliver Krsmanovic for crimes against humanity and violations of the law or customs of war.

A former member of the 2nd Podrinjska Light Infantry Brigade, Krsmanovic is accused of taking part in the "unlawful imprisonment of 70 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians and their killing in the Visegrad neighbourhood of Bikavac on June 27, 1992," the court said.

The rows upon rows of stark white graves on the slope of a hill constitute as grave and evocative a monument to genocide as any architect could have conceived.

There are empty spaces between the 5,200 graves, awaiting the remains of family members and others yet to be found from among the 8,372 Muslims massacred in July 1995. The murderers from a Serb militia, led by Gen. Ratko Mladic, did their deed right under the eyes of United Nations peacekeepers guarding the UN safe haven.

New Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos pledged on Monday evening the parliamentary ratification of the EU bailout deal by the year.

He also vowed to accelerate the structural reforms "to restore confidence" within and outside the debt-ridden country.

In his first address to the Greek parliament since he took office last Friday, the former European Central Bank vice-president presented the main targets of his interim three-party coalition government.

Negotiations revolving around Greece’s next prime minister seem to be coming to an end, with a source telling Reuters European Central Bank Vice President Lucas Papademos is ready to take on the job.

As Greek party leaders scramble to fill the prime minister seat left vacant by George Papandreou, the ruling socialist party seems to have agreed on Papademos and are still ironing out the details, Reuters reported.

The Greek political crisis paralysing the eurozone and threatening to plunge Europe into prolonged financial meltdown and recession could be resolved on Friday after George Papandreou indicated he might step down as prime minister even if he wins today's knife-edge vote of confidence in parliament.

After a day of high political drama and farce, at least one minister indicated to the Guardian that Papandreou is under pressure to stand down whatever the outcome of today's vote. News agencies reported that the socialist premier, forced to withdraw his plan to stage a national referendum on the latest Greek bailout plan, had already decided to give way to his deputy and archrival, finance minister Evangelos Venizelos.

Greeks protesting at austerity measures demanded by foreign lenders blocked a major national parade on Friday to commemorate Greek resistance in World War Two, shouting “traitors” at President Karolos Papoulias and other officials.

The protest in Thessaloniki was echoed at smaller parades across Greece, including in Athens where marchers held black ribbons. It showed the extent of anger at the higher taxes and wage cuts sought by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in return for funds to avert a debt default

Violent ethnic riots swept Bulgaria weeks before this Sunday's presidential elections, following the killing of a teenager by a man with links to a local Bulgarian Roma crime boss. Originally aimed at highlighting the alleged corruption of "Tsar" Kiril Rashkov, these demonstrations soon spread across the country, before ugly scenes developed. Rioters turned on Bulgarian ethnic minorities and Bulgarian Muslims and attacked mosques in both Sofia, the capital, and Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city.

It is important to note Muslims and other minorities in Bulgaria, are Bulgarians of different faith or ethnicity and not immigrants or newcomers. So the question being raised by this kind of attacks is whether Bulgaria is a country of all of its citizens or just some?

A few months earlier, politicians and the public had gathered to show their support for a unified Bulgaria following violent demonstrations outside Sofia's historic Banya Bashi mosque. But what began as a "peaceful protest" against the volume of loudspeakers that broadcast the call to prayer, ended with supporters of Ataka, the ultra-nationalist party, setting fire to prayer mats and pelting worshippers with stones.

Since the project to carve a ‘Greater Serbia’ out of the remains of Yugoslavia has failed, this southeastern European country has seen its territory shrink dramatically. Now its citizens are leaving in throngs, too.

Preliminary results of the latest census by the country’s statistics office have shown that, due to the country’s low birth rate and continued emigration, its population may have dropped by about 200,00 to 300,000 in the last ten years to some 7.4 million people. Some 60,000 people have left the country, according to preliminary estimates.

17 October 2011  Participants of a symposium for prosecutors in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was held from October 11 to 13 this year, discussed the “transparency of judiciary and responsibility of the media” and concluded that both parties had to cooperate with each other more in order for the public to get timely information.

Representatives of the media, prosecutions and human rights organizations discussed the “transparency of judiciary and responsibility of the media” during a panel discussion.

The Macedonian parliament Oct. 15 approved the halting of a census after alleged attempts to artificially boost the number of ethnic Albanians and Turkish minorities by presenting fake IDs led to the resignation of the counting body.

The multi-ethnic governing coalition said in a statement late Oct. 12 that it had decided to end the census, which began on Oct. 1, after the commission in charge resigned Oct. 11 saying the results would not be reliable. The opposition walked out of the vote over the failure to launch a probe whether organizers were responsible for supposedly inflating numbers.

The ambitious retooling of this small nation’s identity — a Balkan brand of hyper-patriotism accompanied by the trumpeting of Macedonia’s ancient roots — is raising concerns internationally about growing authoritarianism, the silencing of dissent and accusations of abuse of power by the governing party here.

The European Commission released its annual report this week on the country’s progress toward E.U. membership, and found that the country was backtracking on protecting media freedoms and that it was making insufficient progress on protecting the rule of law.

It has been a year since the elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but the republic of former Yugoslavia is still living without a government. This has to do with the inability of the three communities in the country - the Muslims, Serbs and Croats - to agree.

The organization called "civil government" announced its presence on the backdrop of the ongoing government crisis in Sarajevo. Its activists tried to break into a government building, but were pushed back by the police. The protesters demanded to form a government as soon as possible and implement reforms necessary for the entry of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the EU. Lithuania that is currently presiding in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) made a similar statement.

Special Rapporteur of the Council of Europe (CoE) Dick Marty stated on Monday that society in Kosovo cannot be democratic until competent bodies face the truth about crimes committed against non-Albanian population and until individuals responsible for the crimes are prosecuted.

There can be no justice without truth, nor can there be democracy without justice, Marty said in an interview for the Swiss portal Swissinfo and added that this is a simple equation that should never be forgotten.

The unclear position of EU member states on the required modifications to Bosnia and Herzegovina's constitution has further contributed to the country's deepening political deadlock.

Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereinafter, 'Bosnia' or 'BiH') has been facing almost two decades of political, economic and administrative paralysis due to, amongst other systemic reasons, slow and insufficient progress on constitutional reform.

Hopes for a quick government in Bosnia were hardly high when rival ethnic nationalists polled strongly in an election last October.

But a year on -- and with Serbs, Croats and Muslims still deadlocked -- the Balkan country risks further disintegration, cut off from international funding and paralysed between opposing visions of its future.

"We don't even read the constitution in the same way," Zlatko Lagumdzija, head of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), said last week.

At least 16 Kosovo Serbs and four NATO troops were injured in clashes at a disputed Kosovo-Serbian border crossing on Tuesday, NATO officials and local authorities said.

Witnesses said troops from the NATO peacekeeping force KFOR responded with fire arms, teargas and rubber bullets to disperse a crowd rallying against the removal of a Serb-held barricade on a small road about 150 meters from the Jarinje border post.

NATO spokesman Ralph Adametz said the incidents started when Serb protesters drove a vehicle at NATO troops and a soldier was injured.

"During the incident an attempt was made to seize the soldier's weapon and after a verbal warning a KFOR soldier fired a shot injuring the civilian attempting to steal the weapon.

The economy is dead, corruption is rampant, and Serbia remains hostile. They could have been pictures from the Balkan 1990s: the burning barricades, the angry Serbs, the international soldiers standing idly by. But the photos that spread from north Kosovo this summer were decidedly present day, images of sudden violence in an area rarely thought of anymore as anything but a byword for crises gone by.

Kosovar police seized two border posts along the country's northern boundary overnight on July 25. The operation escalated a feud with Serbia over customs stamps and control of the north. Ethnic Serbs in the area reacted with fury. Roads were blocked, a policeman was fatally shot and Serb forces were deployed to the border to keep hard-liners from crossing over.

For weeks the crisis simmered. Sabine Freizer, from the International Crisis Group, called it "the most dangerous moment" in the area since 2008, when Kosovo declared independence. The standoff also briefly threw the spotlight back onto Kosovo, a country that, three years after independence, remains deeply dysfunctional.

Kosovo Serbs and Albanians briefly clashed in the divided northern city of Mitrovica overnight amid continuing tensions over two disputed border crossings with Serbia, a Reuters witness said.

No casualties were reported as rival groups of youngsters pelted each others with stones on a blocked bridge over the Ibar river, which divides the city into the northern Serb and southern Albanian parts. NATO troops and European Union police cordoned off the two groups to prevent more violence.