The 100-year anniversary of World War I (1914-18) may have come and gone, but the role of Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip – the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – remains controversial in the turbulent history of the Balkans. For some he was a terrorist, for others a hero.

The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo marked the 100 years since assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie over the weekend in series of ceremonies dedicated to the event that triggered the 1914-18 war, and numerous messages of peace were delivered with calls that history should not be repeated and that violence should be excluded from the modern world.

But if many are looking to the future, historians agree that the tragic event of June 28, 1914, still haunts the region, after Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were plunged into an atrocious inter-ethnic war more than seven decades later.Historians agree that the tragic event of June 28, 1914, still haunts the region, after Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats were plunged into an atrocious inter-ethnic war more than seven decades later

“Unfortunately, it is possible to link World War I and its influence to recent events in the Balkans,” historian Danilo Sarenac of the Belgrade Institute for Modern History told IPS in an interview.

“World War I led to the creation of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated in the 1990s; there is a predominant idea among its former republics that this state was a sort of illusion, a mistake, a kind of ‘dungeon of nations’, and that it had to disappear,” he said.

When Yugoslavia fell apart, six new states – Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia – were created. Ethnic Albanian-populated Kosovo declared unilateral independence from Serbia in 2008, but has not yet been widely recognised as a state.

Socialist Yugoslavia itself was an heir to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, created at the end of WW I. Its biggest portion, Serbia, an ally of Great Britain and France, was rewarded for participation in victory over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany by obtaining South Slav-populated areas of Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia.

The assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was Gavrilo Princip, a 20-year-old Bosnian Serb and member of Young Bosnia, a revolutionary movement seeking the unification of all South Slav nations. He claimed to be “a Yugoslav (South Slav) nationalist” at his trial in 1914. At the time, Bosnia was part of the Austro-Hungary Empire that disintegrated in WW I.

According to Sarenac, “Princip’s action is being interpreted differently, depending on periods we observe in consecutive Yugoslavias.”

“When needed, Princip is a hero who helped create Yugoslavia; but, as newly carved out states (former Yugoslav republics) renounce Yugoslavia, they describe him as a ‘cruel Serb nationalist’. Divisions along such lines were visible in World War II, and came full circle in the 1990s. They were used or abused by everyone at will,” he added.

Princip is blamed by many outside Serbia as the man who triggered World War I, but historians say the world was practically ready for a major war due to many complicated circumstances.

“Princip’s act was just an ingredient that was needed to ignite it,” says Sarenac.

History books say that the Austro-Hungarian Empire blamed Bosnia’s neighbour Serbia for masterminding the assassination of the Archduke; Germany backed the Empire in declaring war against Serbia on June 28, and in a matter of days Russia, Great Britain, France and many other nations were drawn into an unprecedented conflict that took 16 million lives and left 20 million wounded.

For university history professor Predrag Markovic, there is a paradox among the states created by the disintegration of former Yugoslavia.

“They deny that Yugoslavia was created as a deliberate project after World War I, that it was a secular state, designed to bridge religious and regional differences between its new member nations,” Markovic told IPS.

“At the time, Yugoslavia was created much like the European Union today, as a union of entities that share same values. It is absurd that newly created states (since 1991) deny its progressive essence, because many of them – like Macedonia or Slovenia – would not exist had there not been the Yugoslavia after the WW I and Serbia’s victory in it,” he added.

“Their people would cease to exist or would be blended into the ethnicity of the country they’d gone to; Croatia would have been split by Italy, Hungary and Austria,” according to Markovic.

However, he points out, Yugoslavia was a “noble idea”, but with inadequate solutions and deficiencies.

“It inherited all the problems of the empires it helped bring down – Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman (Turkish) state: large numbers of minorities, and an inability to efficiently steer and govern”, he says.

The inter-ethnic problems continued until the Communists took over after World War II, but the two pillars of their regime – late leader Josip Broz Tito and socialist ideology with a human face – helped Yugoslavia to survive.

Markovic says that when these two pillars collapsed, with death of Tito in 1980 and the end of cold war in the 1980s, nationalisms revived and took over in Yugoslavia, setting the scene for the disintegration that began with secession of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991. Bosnia followed in 1992. The secession was opposed by the largest republic of Serbia which was engaged in bloody wars that took more than 100,000 non-Serb lives.

“The experience of Yugoslavia is very ominous for the European Union, bearing in mind the differences that are arising now between the member states,” Markovic argues.

“The circumstances of 1991 were poorly understood by many, the European Union in particular,” The independence of the newly-created states “was hastily acknowledged without any exit strategy or awareness on the consequences, on the next steps; it is much like the rush into the war in 1914, or recently in Iraq,” he added.

In a recent essay on ‘Shots fired by Gavrilo Princip’, Bosnian historian Slobodan Soja summed up the political abuse of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by saying that there is a paradox in recent efforts to establish “whether Princip was a terrorist or not.”

According to Soja, a university professor and former Bosnian ambassador to several countries, “the noble idea of liberation of oppressed and unity among Slav nations is giving way to manipulation” in the deeply divided Bosnian society, where its Muslims, Serbs and Croats are still not mentally at peace.

“Had they known what kind of people would live 100 years on, I doubt that the members of the Young Bosnia movement would give their lives for the generations to come,” Soja wrote.

“The majority of people living today in Bosnia are simply not up to the task of criticising or praising the Young Bosnians. Those were the idealists whose ideas we badly need today,” he added.

Credit: Public Domain

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jun 2 2014 (IPS)

Waters have receded in Serbia after the worst flooding the country has seen in 120 years, and something new has surfaced, apart from devastated fields and property – censorship of the internet.

A number of sites and blogs that criticised the government’s behaviour at the peak of the floods two weeks ago – in which over 50 people died – were hacked, unavailable or removed, showing the “error 404” message whenever an attempt was made to access them.

Some 30 people have been detained in the past two weeks for “dissemination of false news and panic”, in the words of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Three young men spent nine days in custody for their Facebook posts, which cited hundreds of casualties in the worst hit town of Obrenovac, 33 kms south west from Belgrade. The three were released but will soon face trial. If guilty, they face six months to five years in prison."There is an obvious effort by the state to narrow the social dialogue … It's also an effort to introduce one-mindedness in the country" – head of the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia (NUNS)

Sources at the Prosecutor’s Office, who insisted on anonymity, told IPS that “such comments and posts could have caused panic or grave disturbance of public order”, denying that the process represented any type of crawling censorship. Censorship is banned by the Constitution of Serbia.

However, hacking and downing of the Teleprompter.rs and Drugastrana.rs sites that carried highly critical items on Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and his government’s behaviour under titles “People are desperate”, “Vucic to stop with pathos and self pity”, “State, we’d won’t keep you any longer” were described as clear censorship by professionals and the Ombudsman of the Republic of Serbia, Sasa Jankovic.

A blog on the most popular site which said “I’ AV (Aleksandar Vucic), resign”, was removed without any explanation from the web site of “Blic” newspaper. Axel Springer Media, the owner of the paper, would not comment on the case.

“There is an obvious effort by the state to narrow the social dialogue,” said the head of the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia (NUNS). “It’s also an effort to introduce one-mindedness in the country.”

Ombudsman Jankovic said in a statement that it is becoming harder to hide censorship because “we see more often that some information or critics are being withdrawn from publicly available media and information space.”

One clear case of censorship was the removal of the appeal by Belgrade Mayor Sinisa Mali to citizens of Obrenovac not to leave their homes on Friday, May 16. It was posted on the official site of the Serbian capital of Belgrade, because Obrenovac is one of its city municipalities.

It disappeared from the site after the town was completely flooded the same day, when 23,000 people were hastily evacuated. It remained at cache, only to be re-distributed over Facebook and Twitter en masse.

Mali is one of the top officials of Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of Prime Minister Vucic. The SNS won last early general elections in May and run the nation together with Socialists of late strongman Slobodan Milosevic. The coalition has run the country since 2012, when Democrats, who toppled Milosevic in 2000, lost elections due to widespread corruption and inability to save the country from the effects of the global downturn.

However, the Prime Minister denied existence of censorship in his recent appearance at state-run Radio-television of Serbia (RTS).

“It is absolutely untrue that there was censorship or that there were demands for certain texts or posts to be withdrawn,” Vucic said.

He was reacting fiercely to a statement by Dunja Mijatovic, media freedom official of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At last week’s OSCE meeting in Stockholm, she expressed deep concern over allegations that websites and online content are being blocked in Serbia.

“This is a clear violation of the right to free expression. The Internet provides unparalleled opportunities to support these rights and is essential for the free flow and access to information,” she said.

For professionals in Serbia, the behaviour of Vucic does not come as a surprise. In 1999, at the time of NATO bombing, he was part of the Milosevic’s government, the youngest-ever Information Minister. Strict media censorship, together with repressive laws with fines amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars for independent media marked his time in that position.

“It’s the same as in Milosevic’s era, maybe worse” said veteran journalist Jasminka Kocijan.

She experienced first-hand the consequences of meddling into state affairs earlier this year.

After a widely propagated footage showed Vucic saving a child from snow in the northern town of Feketic, she posted on her Facebook page an item from the Red Cross which described how volunteers really saved people stuck in high snow. She was immediately removed from her editorial post at the state-run Tanjug news agency.

Since coming to power in 2012, Vucic and his team have been diligent in efforts to remove all the satirical or even factual online contents dealing with Progressives. A blog on internal issues within the party was removed back then, while online photos or items on Vucic’s second marriage last November were immediately removed.

The last incident of the online censorship happened on Sunday evening, when the Pescanik.net web site went down. It carried an analysis of three university professors on the doctor’s thesis by Vucic’s right hand and Minister of Interior Nebojsa Stefanovic. The analysis showed that the thesis was a plagiarism.

Photo circulating in the Balkans on Facebook

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, May 21 2014 (IPS)

The Balkans region is living one of its most horrible springs ever, after the worst flooding in 120 years took 47 lives and witnessed evacuation of dozens of thousands of Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs in a matter of days last week. 

“This is the worst post-war disaster in Bosnia,” President of Bosnia-Herzegovina Bakir Izetbegovic told reporters in Sarajevo on Monday, describing the deluge in the country, while Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic dubbed the floods as “historic” and “catastrophic” only a day earlier.

Times are changing and it was Slovenes and Croats, together with Macedonians and Montenegrins, who rushed first to flooded areas of Bosnia and Serbia
Meteorologists in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia agreed that only three days of unprecedented torrential rains in what used to be former Yugoslavia last week brought the equivalent of three months’ rains for the region.

Izetbegovic told journalists that the disaster saw “biggest movement of population in Bosnia since the war”, as dozens of thousands in the nation of four million were displaced in a matter of days, looking at their homes disappearing under the river torrents or in one of 3,000 landslides in affected areas. About one million people are without drinking water, he added.

In Serbia, more than 30,000 have been evacuated from the city of Obrenovac, only 33 kms south west from the capital of Belgrade. It houses the biggest thermal power plant “Nikola Tesla” that supplies electricity for half of Serbia.

All the affected areas in Bosnia, Croatia – where 10,000 people have been evacuated – and Serbia lie along the river Sava, described in old geography textbooks as “the river that binds the nations of (former) Yugoslavia.”

It seems to be doing it again now, although Yugoslavia has no longer existed since 1991.

“I was surprised to see a guy in a uniform which was not Serbian, waiving his hand and calling me to a boat,” says Ivica Marjanovic (63), evacuated at the weekend from Obrenovac. “Only when he spoke, I realised he was Croatian … He smiled, I smiled and went into the boat … I didn’t expect a Croat to save me,” Ivica told IPS in one of Belgrade’s sports halls which serves as shelter for the evacuated.

Yugoslavia fell apart in bloody wars after Serbia opposed Bosnia’s, Croatia’s and Slovenia’s independence moves. The wars lasted until 1995, taking the harsh toll of more than 120,000 lives, most of them non-Serbs.

However, times are changing and it was Slovenes and Croats, together with Macedonians and Montenegrins, who rushed first to flooded areas of Bosnia and Serbia

“We had a unique experience,” a Slovene helicopter pilot who declined to give his name told IPS. “We took a woman from Obrenovac to a hospital in Belgrade and she gave birth to a healthy baby only an hour later … We are professionals, we’re used to such things, but somehow it’s different when we’re in Serbia than when we’re in, say Italy … Maybe the common roots are responsible for that,” he added.

Slovenia and Croatia sent 30 members of their rescue teams in helicopters, bringing inflatable boats, water pumps and water filtering equipment to Serbia. Macedonians collected food with long shelf life and sent trucks with bottled water to flooded areas.

Montenegro sent a military unit that participated in evacuating the worst-struck Obrenovac area in Serbia, together with Serbian police and military.

The Croatian Highway Authority (HAC) announced that otherwise hefty tolls would not be paid by vehicles carrying humanitarian aid to flooded areas.

“This comes as no surprise, this solidarity,” said Goran Svilanovic, Secretary General of Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) (www.rcc.int), an organisation that supervises efforts for improved cooperation and reconciliation in former Yugoslavia.

“It should be appropriate for all the nations struck by tragic floods to take joint action before the European Union and jointly ask for financial aid,” Svilanovic told IPS. “Going before the EU separately would not be as effective,” he added.

Serbia is a candidate for the EU membership, while Bosnia-Herzegovina has not reached the status yet. Croatia and Slovenia have already joined the 27-member family of European nations.

Svilanovic’s idea was backed by Serbian Parliament spokeswoman Maja Gojkovic, who told Serbian media Tuesday that “this (the joint action by Bosnia and Serbia) could be an efficient move.”

Conservative estimates have put the amount of damages at half a billion euros (685 million U.S. dollars).

To ordinary people in the region, the re-birth of solidarity among former Yugoslav nations does not seem odd.

“Our languages are more or less the same, our way of life as well; we have common heritage,” says Selma Sebo, a 43-year-old from the Bosnian town of Tuzla. “Our disaster is the same, that’s why we can feel for each other,” she told IPS over the phone.

Thousands of people have rallied in streets of major Bosnian cities since last week, demanding social justice, decent living conditions and resignation of top officials who they openly blame for unprecedented poverty and the country’s economic decline.

The first protest rallies since the end of the bloody 1992-95 war began earlier this month in the north-eastern town of Tuzla, where thousands of workers from five major privatised companies had received no payments in years. They were joined in following weeks by thousands of unemployed young people and pensioners."The biggest fear of ruling elites all over and their nightmare is for ordinary people (of all ethnicities) to unite."

Backed by social networks and informal groups, the protests spread to capital Sarajevo and to Zenica, Kakanj, Travnik, Jajce, Brcko, Bihac, Mostar and several other towns. International media immediately dubbed the protests, some of them turning violent, the “Bosnian spring”. Some call it “the winter of Bosnian discontent”.

“It’s still winter here and we’d rather describe the events as an expression of widespread discontent and an introduction to ending the arrogant, unemotional and even scornful behaviour of authorities towards most people, who live in poverty,” Kemal Kurspahic, co-founder of the Media in Democracy Institute in Bosnia, told IPS.

Data from the central Bosnian statistics office puts the unemployment rate at 44 percent. It says that one in five out of 3.8 million people in Bosnia live below the poverty line. For the employed, the average monthly salary is 570 dollars.

“More and more people live in misery and poverty. They are hungry,” Vahid Sehic from the NGO Forum of Tuzla Citizens told IPS.

After the bloody war of the nineties ended with the loss of some 100,000 lives, the country’s industry came to a standstill. It seemed at first that recovery could be at hand, but the slow transition into a market economy entailed a complete change from what used to be former Yugoslavia with its deeply rooted social benefits.

“There are practically two decades of economic devastation, where private interests of the ruling elite, masked as ‘protection of national interest’ served as an excuse for unfair distribution of wealth among the privileged,” said Kurspahic.

The complicated regulation of the internationally sponsored Dayton Peace Accords, that defined the power structure for former warring ethnicities – Bosniak Muslims, Croats and Serbs – had a devastating effect on any possibility of creating an efficient state with a positive investment climate.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into two entities – the Bosnian Serb Republic of Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Federation, both topped with a Sarajevo-based central authority. Vetoing decisions at the central level have often blocked any initiatives for reforms.

Both entities have their own governments and parliaments, plus a central one in Sarajevo. The Federation is divided into 11 cantons created on ethnic lines for areas with a Muslim or Croat majority. This in practice means that the Muslim-Croat Federation area has 11 local governments with 11 prime ministers.

Most political leaders now are those who were leaders of major national parties during the 1992-95 war. That is “about 80 percent,” said Kurspahic. “Approximately half of Bosnia’s budget goes to salaries in administration.”

Privatisation of major industrial complexes was mostly hasty. It enabled newly born tycoons, close to people in power, to size down or even shut dozens of companies and make quick profits by selling their assets before declaring bankruptcy. Bosnian media has widely reported that new owners often failed to comply with privatisation contracts and failed to pay workers for years.

One of the worst instances is the Sodaso factory in Tuzla. It produced 80 percent of the table salt consumed in former Yugoslavia, amounting to 208,000 tonnes in 1991. In 1999, it produced 21,000 tonnes.

Besides, Tuzla had an additional burden to cope with. After the fall of the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces executed some 7,000 men and boys, their family members adding up to some 35,000 children, women and the elderly were transported to Tuzla.

Since protests began, several cantonal prime ministers, including Tuzla’s, have resigned. Sarajevo protestors have been offered negotiations by authorities over the modifications of certain laws, and new elections. The authorities have agreed to create ‘plenums’ in major cities such as Sarajevo that include representatives of political parties and leading civil society organisations in order to negotiate possibilities of fresh elections or other peaceful means for ending the protests.

“This is the first time we saw fear in people in power,” Sehic said. “They worry that the social unrest will spread, and that the story of ‘endangered ethnicity’ will go down the drain; this means they go down the drain as well.”

Several analysts point out that the protests in Bosnia carried no ethnic dimension. “It was more solidarity of people with no rights, the poor and unemployed, regardless of their nation,” said Zarko Papic from the Sarajevo-based NGO, the Initiative for Better and Humane Inclusion.

Svetlana Cenic who teaches economics at the University of Banjaluka in the Republic of Srpska says there can be no serious changes in Bosnia Herzegovina without the social unity of all ethnicities.

“The hungry belly is mine as well as yours, it does not differ between ethnicities,” she said. “The biggest fear of ruling elites all over and their nightmare is for ordinary people (of all ethnicities) to unite.”

That does not seem very likely. Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik visited Belgrade almost immediately after the unrest in the Federation began, and told journalists after his meeting with first Vice Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic that there were no reasons for Bosnian Serbs to join the protest, claiming that “the RS will remain calm” as “some forces from the Federation want escalation of unrest into the RS.”

The abandoned Goli Otok prison. Credit: Pokrajac CC BY-SA 3.0.

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Feb 3 2014 (IPS)

One of the best kept secrets of former Yugoslavia is out in the open after the online release of the names of 16,101 inmates of Goli Otok, or the Naked Island, the country’s only gulag – a Soviet system of forced labour camps – created 65 years ago.

The long list, available online at the Croatian website led to unprecedented reactions among the few survivors of Goli Otok and their families across the former federation that fell apart in 1991.

The reactions reveal how the hardships of many Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Slovenes or Serbs, all inmates of Goli Otok, remained a burden and a source of family shame for generations. They can now hope to come to terms with the traumatic past of their family members.Children were told their fathers were "on a business trip" that lasted years.

“I always wanted to know what was wrong with the life of my maternal grandfather,” Smiljana Stojkovic, a 45-year-old teacher in Belgrade, tells IPS.

Stojkovic remembers that her grandfather Stanko used to tell stories about his life as a shoemaker’s apprentice before World War II and of battles against Germans during the war, as he was a communist.

“It ended there with a vacuum until the time it came to us, his grandchildren, in the 1960s. We were told never to ask what happened in between,” she says.

Stojkovic now knows that her grandfather, who died in 2000, was an inmate of Goli Otok for seven years. “He must have said he preferred Stalin to (Yugoslav leader Josip Broz) Tito, being a loyal communist who believed in the (former) Soviet Union…Now I understand his silence,” she says.

Goli Otok is an uninhabited and tiny, almost barren island, six kilometres off the north Croatian coast. In July 1949, it was turned into a single prison for opponents of Yugoslavia’s political leadership which decided to leave the Soviet orbit in June 1948.

The decision is known as “the historic ‘no’” to Stalin, who demanded that Yugoslav communists topple the regime of Tito (1892-1980). In Stalin’s words, Tito became “a servant of imperialism”, or of capitalist countries of the West. Prior to that, Soviet and Yugoslav communists were allies in the battle against Germans in World War II.

“For many communists, it was impossible that Stalin was wrong,” says Zoran Asanin, head of the Belgrade Association Goli Otok.

In his words, and in the words and memoirs of many survivors, at party meetings they were simply asked if they preferred Stalin over Tito in 1948. If their answer was yes, they were sent to Goli Otok, without any court procedure or written sentence. Not even the closest family members knew where they were.

Political prisoners were shipped to the island from the nearby Bakar port on the Adriatic coast. There were four camps at the 4.7 sq km Goli Otok, with no sanitation or any decent facilities.

The island is known for its harsh climate – scorching summers and chilling winters. The inmates worked at the local quarry, often beaten by guards as “traitors” to the Yugoslav cause or even made to beat each other.

Famine and thirst were a daily routine – 200 decilitres of water per day and simple bread were provided for each inmate.

The recently released list of names provides a figure of 413 dead – either due to illnesses such as typhoid and untreated heart conditions or due to suicide – from 1949 until 1956 when the last political prisoners were transported to the shore and taken to ordinary jails all over former Yugoslavia.

For years, they were deprived of political rights, could not find employment, and many faced rejection by their family members who were exposed to harassment by secret police or neighbours and friends.

Children were told their fathers were “on a business trip” that lasted years, as many of the descendants say in their comments under the list of names available online. Wives were given instant divorces from the inmates of Goli Otok. But sometimes even that was not enough.

“I had to publicly renounce my husband at a (communist) party meeting in order to pursue my university professor’s career,” Rada B., 88, told IPS. “I had to promise he would not be able to see our daughter ever again and I did exactly that. She never forgave me.”

The truth about Goli Otok became slowly known in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia fell apart and many secrets of former communist regimes came out. However, the bloody wars of disintegration in those years prevented closure for the families, victims and survivors.

Only in recent years have Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia begun to compensate victims of Goli Otok, many of whom were innocent or not even communist.

According to Asanin, there are some 300 survivors of Goli Otok in Serbia. They have demanded political rehabilitation and compensation from the Ministry of Justice.

The state has agreed to pay 700 dinars (8.5 dollars) for each day spent at Goli Otok to former prisoners. So far, Serbia has paid 53 million dinars or more than 640,000 dollars to survivors or their immediate heirs.

The mostly anonymous comments and reactions under the list of names of Goli Otok inmates are touching and, sometimes, more revealing than the stories of inmates.

“I found my uncle, I know he was there because he joked about politics,” a comment by a woman named Beba says. “My grandfather was there only because he said that diplomatic magazines (post World War II shops for privileged communist leaders) should be open for all people,” a man named Bane writes.

People from all over former Yugoslavia have exchanged e-mails in order to learn more about the circumstances of their family member’s life or death at Goli Otok. Many have spoken of years of silence by relatives and recounted family tales of how innocent men disappeared overnight and ended up at the island.

“Yes, one could end up at Goli Otok simply because he had more than the others, due to gossip or because someone wanted somebody else’s wife,” Rada B. says. “But those were extraordinary times that called for extraordinary measures and we had to believe our leaders. Where would we end otherwise?” asks the retired university professor.

The island of Goli Otok remains deserted after the prison was closed, and only curious tourists visit it from time to time to see the remnants of former camps.

A breadbasket left in a Belgrade store for the needy to dip into. Credit: Vesna Peric Zimonjic/IPS.

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Dec 12 2013 (IPS)

In the early morning hours, as hundreds of people grab their breakfast at a busy bakery in Beogradska Street in the Serbian capital, a very special basket quickly fills up with croissants, rolls and breads. It is the ‘solidarity basket’.

It’s a concept that around 60 bakeries all over Serbia have introduced. While ordering something for themselves, customers buy an additional bread, croissant or bun and place it in the basket – for the needy.

“Approximately one in 10 customers buys an extra item and leaves it in the solidarity basket,” said baker Veljko Antic."Those who rely on these bits come much later. They usually sneak in and hurriedly walk away."

“Those who rely on these bits come much later. They usually sneak in and hurriedly walk away. They are ashamed, sad and grim…That is why we’ve placed the basket close to the entrance of our bakery so as not to add to their shame,” Antic told IPS.

This is the first initiative of its kind as poverty hits Serbia hard. Similar campaigns are unfolding in neighbouring countries too, mostly nations born out of erstwhile Yugoslavia.

Latest statistics show that 700,000 people in Serbia, which has a population of 7.2 million, live below the poverty line. As defined by the World Bank, this means they survive on less than 1.25 dollars a day. Out of 1.02 million children aged 0-14 in Serbia, 12 percent are poor and 6.6 percent suffer from malnutrition, according to official data.

The ‘solidarity meal’ was introduced by a group of young internet enthusiasts from the portal www.kioskpages.com that promotes online shopping. The inspiration for their initiative – “Express solidarity, buy food for those who need it” – came from Italy, where people leave small change for coffee for those who cannot afford it.

“We liked the idea, but decided to focus on food,” Nina Milos, 24, from Kioskpages told IPS. “People in Serbia are in greater need of food than coffee.”

Serbia has a total of 68 Red Cross-run soup kitchens, but some are facing closure due to lack of funds. Red Cross officials have for long said their efforts are not enough to feed the needy.

“We were worried about the logistics of reaching out to different sets of people – who would introduce the solidarity meal, who would support it, who would use it, as the latter certainly have no access to the internet,” Milos said.

“That’s why we opted for posters at bakeries and ads in free newspapers, and we also networked with NGOs that work with the homeless or the poor,” she added.

According to her, the campaign has worked best in the capital, Belgrade, and the northern city of Novi Sad.

And that’s not all, she said. Many greengrocers have started offering for free the fruits and vegetables they haven’t sold during the day. “Several takeaways have joined in,” Milos said.

A similar campaign is being introduced in neighbouring Macedonia too. According to Milos, 10 bakeries in the capital, Skopje, and in the town of Kumanovo have joined the initiative.

“Solidarity had become a forgotten word in Serbia,” psychologist Miljana Radojevic told IPS.

“People are impoverished and hardly think about others,” she said. “However, there are those who are well to do or even those who are not so well off but can spend some extra money for those who need it,” she said.

The transition into a market economy after the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s and the economic crisis of 2008 has battered Serbia. Unemployment stands at 24.1 percent, affecting more than a third of the workforce.

The situation is a bit better in the other nations of erstwhile Yugoslavia, but poverty is knocking on the doors of many in the region.

Slovenia, with an unemployment rate of 12.8 percent, is still holding up well. But there too, a catering service, www.minestra.si, has introduced a similar initiative called ‘an afterwards meal’.

“Such meals are given away to [the Catholic church humanitarian organisation] Caritas for further distribution,” said Peter Bostjancic of Minestra. “They are consumed by the poor and also by employed people whose incomes are too small for them to get by on,” Bostjancic told IPS.

In Croatia, where unemployment stands at 19 percent, the “urban poor” phenomenon is growing. “These are mostly well-educated people who have been left jobless after the companies they worked for closed down,” a source from Croatian Caritas told IPS on condition of anonymity.

“These are people who, until recently, were above the poverty line, but loss of jobs, rising prices and the burden of mortgages have put them in difficulties,” the source said.

And so, the idea behind the solidarity basket is catching on.

Belgrade bakeries work until late evening. Some people who depend on the solidarity basket come to Beogradska Street only when there are not many passersby.

One of them is 43-year-old Zorana Savovic, a single mother with two children who works for a meagre salary at a newspaper stand near a bakery.

“I’m ashamed to have to do this,” Savovic told IPS.

“But it provides the evening meal for me and my children. I eat nothing during the day and keep an eye on the basket across the street. I go in just before they close and then hurry home to my kids with food.”

According experts from the Faculty of Agriculture at the Belgrade University, indigenous fruit and vegetable species in the Balkans have lost the battle against the big international seed-producing companies. Courtesy: Vesna Peric Zimonjic

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Sep 16 2013 (IPS)

This year, summer in the Balkans has been nice and warm, leaving behind a land of plenty, and enough food on the table. Except that people are talking about tomatoes “that don’t taste as they used to,” watermelons that are too watery, cabbages that are hard to slice through and onions that do not sting your eyes.

It is an angry buzz, resonating across popular forums and social networking sites in Serbia. Farmers are being accused of surrendering to the pressures of seed importers and neglecting home-grown or indigenous species that had served them well so far.“One’s own production of home-grown healthy vegetables means salvation for many small people in times of crises." -- Croatian journalist and environmental activist, Denis Romac

“There’s small chance today that you will find out whether what you have bought is a real, home-grown tomato,” says Jasmina Zdravkovic of the Institute of Farming in the central Serbian town of Smederevska Palanka, some 63 km southeast of the capital Belgrade.

“Most probably you’ll end up with one which has a white, inedible middle. It comes from the gene that was introduced to keep the tomato firm,” she tells IPS. Such tomatoes are never ripe; they only get red from the outside, Zdravkovic adds.

According to Zdravkovic and experts from the Faculty of Agriculture at the Belgrade University, indigenous species have lost the battle against the big international seed-producing companies. Native species have been reduced to being cultivated either in private gardens or in small local areas.

Since 2000, when the international sanctions imposed on Serbia following the 1998-1999 Kosovo war were lifted, imported seeds have made an unopposed, uncontrolled entry into the Serbian market. Hybrid seeds from biotech giants such as Monsanto, DuPont or Syngenta have taken over completely.

According to the latest statistics from the Chamber of Commerce, the country imported 230 tonnes of seed and propagation material worth 810,000 dollars in the first three months of 2013 alone.

“Under such circumstances, there is no hope of seeing any commercial production of indigenous species,” Djordje Glamoclija of the agriculture faculty tells IPS.

However, the country has been making sustained effort to preserve its genetic plant heritage. A national programme for conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources is in the final stages. And one of its main proposals is to consolidate a national gene bank.

Serbia’s plant genetic resources (PGR), says Milena Savic, the future head of the gene bank, are currently “scattered around the country, in agricultural institutes and faculties.”

The national collection has 5,000 samples of 273 plant species native to Serbia. “They will represent the basis for PGR, in tune with the national and global policy of preserving original species,” she says.

“Samples have so far been kept for the medium [20 years] and long term [50 years],” Savic tells IPS. Plant genes are kept in special chambers at temperatures of minus 20 degree Celsius, while plant samples are kept at four degree Celsius.

Working with these indigenous species, Serbia hopes to develop improved seed varieties by crossing them with high-yielding plant types. Serbia is also part of the regional PGR conservation initiative called the South East European Development Network.

West of Serbia, the outcry against the dominance of imported seeds in Croatia had peaked before the country’s entry into the European Union (EU) on Jul. 1 this year.

It continued throughout the summer, with 18 non-governmental organisations asking the authorities to prevent the “greed of multinational corporations that threaten to endanger resources that represent the foundation of Croatian food industry.”

Croatia does not have a single seed-producing facility any more, and relies completely on imported seed. The nation spends 60 million dollars annually on the import of seed and propagation material, according to the Croatian Society of Agronomy.

One particular cause for concern was the new EU regulation on seeds and propagation material that required, in the name of consumer and food safety, the registration of all fruits, vegetables and trees before they could be reproduced or distributed.

The regulation was finally changed under pressure from European NGOs, including the 18 in Croatia. It now allows home gardeners to save and swap unregistered seed and small organisations with less than 10 employees to grow unregistered vegetable seed.

“Seeds represent the richness of today and tomorrow,” says Denis Romac, a Croatian journalist and environmental activist. “One’s own production of home-grown healthy vegetables means salvation for many small people in times of crises. No wonder people are taking to lots in cities or even growing something on their balconies and gardens if they have them.”

The economic crisis of the past year has indeed hit the region hard, with the unemployment rate in Serbia hitting 27 percent of its 7.22 million population and 18.5 percent of Croatia’s 4.26 million people.

Serbian farmers and home gardeners, meanwhile, have taken recourse to the oldest yet safest method: of saving seeds at the end of one season and planting them in the next.

“I keep seeds from year to year and use them in the garden,” Milentije Savovic tells IPS. He has several hectares of different vegetable gardens near Belgrade and sells his produce in the city’s popular Kalenic green market.

In his stall, one can find the popular “oxheart” tomatoes, “cake” or flat onions, small pearl beans and very dry “cerovaca” melons, popular among elders as the fruit of their youth.

“As for domestic [indigenous] species,” says Savovic, “there is no doubt that they are the best adapted to our climate, soil and means of protection. So why change them if they are good?”

The agriculture faculty’s Glamoclija, however, strikes a note of caution here. “One should not confuse the growing of traditional or old, autonomous species with the modern trends of healthy food growing,” he tells IPS.

“Well-adapted home-grown species need good care and adequate protection. Non-treated fruits can contain toxic bacteria instead of pesticides. So the so-called ‘return to nature’ can be like riding a bike in the downtown of a city amidst gases exhaled by heavy vehicles,” he adds.

A man walks by the police checkpoint in Gundik Shalal in northeast Syria. There are believed to be more than 300 Muslims from the Balkans fighting in Syria. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS.

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Aug 2 2013 (IPS)

This holy month of Ramadan comes with a difference for some families in the Balkans. It is the first without their young sons, husbands or brothers who died far away from home fighting in Syria.

Muaz Sabic (41) died near Aleppo two months ago. The family from the tiny village Puhovac near the central Bosnian town Zenica only recently learnt of his death.

From what they know, Muaz was member of a unit of young Muslims from different countries who went into Syria to fight the regime of President Basher Al-Assad.The monthly income for jihadis paid through organisations disguised as 'humanitarian agencies', can be about 600 dollars.

“It was his choice,” Muaz’s brother Ilijas Sabic told IPS over the phone. “He was a farmer, lived in the village with our mother, and made honey. I don’t want to talk about him any more…Everything I ever told journalists was abused.”

In earlier interviews with Bosnian media, Ilijas said his brother left Sarajevo for Istanbul in March. Muaz travelled with a couple of young men from Zenica and nearby Kakanj.

According to the local reports, Muaz is one of 52 Bosniak Salafis who left for Syria. Volunteers from Bosnia reportedly gather in the Turkish town Antakya and cross into Syria illegally at the Bab el Hawa crossing.

There are believed to be more than 300 Muslims from the Balkans fighting in Syria. They come from Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia.

Volunteers gather again in the Syrian town Sarmada, where they are trained to join the Free Syrian Army. Most join the Al-Nusra unit, labelled by the U.S., the United Nations and Britain a terrorist organisation “with links to Al-Qaeda.”

The fighters are Salafis. Salafism is a movement within Sunni Islam calling for a return to the original values of the faith. It aims to clear modern Muslim life of any influence of Western models and principles.

Bosnian Muslims are Sunnis. Many have re-invented their religion after the 1992 – 1995 war in which more than 100,000 people died, most of them Muslims. This return to Islam was strongly backed by humanitarian aid organisations from Arab countries and particularly Saudi Arabia where Wahhabism which is closely linked to Salafism is the dominant form of Islam.

According to a former top official of the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bajro Ikanovic (37) is among those taking Bosniak Muslims to Syria. In 2007, he was sentenced to eight years in prison by a Sarajevo court on charges of terrorism. His home in Hadzici near Sarajevo was found to be a storage for explosives.

At the time of his trial, Caucasian looking Muslim extremists engaged in terrorism were dubbed “the white Al-Qaeda”.

Ikanovic was freed after four years, and began to organise volunteers for Syria.

Ikanovic told the religious site www.putvjernika.com in an interview that “the difference between us and other revolutionaries is that we are firmly convinced of the righteousness of Islam as the only real way, and the only way for man to return to normal. I absolutely don’t care what becomes of my children, we leave them to the law of Allah and we’ll be proud of our deeds and our lives the way we lived them.”

Muaz Sabic was not the only victim from the Balkans in Syria. Two young men from the southern Serbian town Novi Pazar died in Syria in May. Their deaths were praised on the local www.sandzakhaber.net site. Known under their battle names Abu Bera and Abu Merdia, Eldar Kundakovic and Adis Salihovic died in an effort to free prisoners from the Al-Safira jail near Aleppo.

The SIPA official told IPS that “the war in Bosnia opened the doors for re-invention of Islam; jihad fighters who came here to fight along their Muslim brethren against Serbs or Croats brought their ideology, customs and enthusiasm. For some young men that was a revelation, a kind of missing link being revealed. However, there was never enough evidence that this led to mass scale.”

But some Sarajevans see the more fundamental change.

“It is no secret that people are being paid to go to Syria or other fronts for that matter,” a local resident told IPS. “Mosques are places where people gather more than ever in the past…they hear their imams calling for solidarity, explaining the sufferings of fellow Muslims in Syria and all over the world.

“For those who are barely earning any money, as unemployment reaches almost 45 percent here, this is an opportunity to get something.”

The monthly income for jihadis paid through organisations disguised as ‘humanitarian agencies’, can be about 600 dollars. “Isn’t that a lot under the circumstances?” the resident said.

The global economic crisis has not hit Serbia for the first time, but this year it has bitten into Serbian culture. State subsidies for theatres, festivals, films and exhibitions have almost hit the bottom. State support for films is down to zero.

The Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra has under the circumstances made an unprecedented move. Since last month it has been organising donation concerts and dinners in an aim to collect the 1.5 million dollars it needs for a planned first tour of the United States next year.

“The result was spectacular,” director of the philharmonic Ivan Tasovac told IPS in an interview. “We collected 599,860 dollars from major Serbian private companies, international companies with offices here, hundreds of friends abroad and at home, foreign diplomats, as well as ordinary people – students, pensioners. No matter how big or small the sums, they are all so worthy for us.”

The national 11.4-billion-dollar budget provisioned only 0.62 percent this year for some 10,650 institutions of culture.

Culture has traditionally been co-financed by many sponsors such as public enterprises, large companies, big businesses and individual investors. But such investments have been declining over the past few years.

The Belgrade Philharmonic faced cuts in state funds in its 90th year of existence. The ensemble includes 98 musicians, with an average age of 35.

“We then ‘found’ a dusty book on the shelf called ‘Serbian philanthropy’ and used it,” Tasovac said, referring to an old tradition of donations.

A concert on Jun. 7 was conducted by the celebrated Zubin Mehta (77). The Belgrade Philharmonic was one of the first Mehta played with, back in 1956. Mehta helped the philharmonic establish a foundation in the U.S. that will co-finance the tour in 2014, with support also from contributors outside the Balkans.

The concert and another that followed a week later were followed by donors’ dinners in a posh Belgrade restaurant, at 325 dollars a guest. Guests were also invited to make further donations.

“This is the first time in the region that anyone has taken to this form of financing,” Tasovac said. “Most of serious institutions of culture all over the Balkans are in the same situation as we are. We hope we can inspire them to do the same.”

The Serbian Ministry of Culture has faced harsh criticism for weeks now, after it announced its final budgetary allocations.

All funding was withdrawn for the Nishville international jazz festival in the southern Serbian town Nis. The festival has hosted some of the most famous jazz artists for years. The October Salon of Painting dating from early 1960s also failed to get any funding. The international Belgrade theatre festival Bitef saw its funds sliced to half.

“We’ll see theatres closing down, as we saw cinemas die, we’ll have exhibitions in the dark, our museums are on the road to death,” theatre director Milica Kralj told IPS. “We must ask ourselves what our country will look like for our children tomorrow.”

October Salon manager Mia David objected to the criterion the Ministry of Culture adopted for cuts. “Modern creativity is not a priority in Serbia,” she said. “My guess is that the so-called ‘patriotic projects’ have eaten the funds.”

Expensive projects are under way to mark a thousand years of the historic Edict of Milan, when Roman Emperor Constantine I endorsed Christianity as the official religion of the state. The emperor was born in Naissus, today’s city of Nis in Serbia.

“We are a poor country, but we’ll become a country without culture if things continue like this,” film critic Milan Vlajcic told IPS. “Our ministers – except for a handful of them – are completely uncivilised people and go to theatres only if the TV cameras will catch them. Culture means nothing to them.”

The Serbian Orthodox Church is highly influential in Serbia. Above, the Cathedral of Saint Sava in Belgrade. Credit: George Groutas/CC by 2.0

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, May 16 2013 (IPS)

The influential Serbian Orthodox Church publicly crossed a line recently when two of its top clergymen took part in a Belgrade rally with messages amounting to direct threats against the lives of government officials.

The rally last Friday was organised by opponents of Serbia’s recent and historic agreement with Kosovo that essentially ceded authority over Kosovo’s Serb population to Pristina.

“We pray for the dead souls of government and parliament, and may all their sins be forgiven,” Archbishop Amfilohije told some 3,000 ultra nationalists who gathered at the central Republic Square.

Amfilohije’s words were followed by a warning from Bishop Atanasije to current Prime Minister Ivica Dacic. “The prime minister speaks about real politics only,” the bishop said. “That is how Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic [assassinated in 2003] used to speak, and we all know how he ended.”

The agreement with Pristina was signed last month under the auspices of the European Union (EU) and called for the normalisation of relations between Serbia and its former province.

It also caused deep disturbance among some 100,000 Serbs who live in Kosovo and refuse to recognise the authority of Pristina, despite their largely having autonomy.

A tense history

Populated by 1.7 million ethnic Albanians, Kosovo was part of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, which fell apart in 1991, and was under direct rule of Belgrade, with a Serb minority holding power until 1999.

In the 1990s, armed rebellion against Belgrade led to bloody repression by the security forces of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic that left more than 13,000 ethnic Albanians dead. The bloodshed was stopped by 11 weeks of NATO bombing in Serbia in 1999 and by the introduction of United Nations rule over the former Serbian province.

After building its first democratic institutions, Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and has so far been recognised as a state by 96 nations.

But Kosovo is also the cradle of the Serb medieval state, embedded in the hearts and minds of millions of Serbs as the home of their rulers and Orthodox Christianity. Some of the oldest and most important monasteries and churches are in Kosovo, despite the fact that ethnic Albanians have become a majority there.

“Nothing can justify the scandalous behaviour of two bishops at the rally,” religion analyst and author Mirko Djordjevic told IPS. “Speeches by two SPC [Serbian Orthodox Church] primates are unprecedented and will certainly bear influence on future relations between the government and the church.”

“It’s high time the SPC stopped meddling into affairs of state,” commented leading Belgrade daily Blic. “The reputation of this institution has now been burnt to the ground, and its hate speech should be sanctioned.”

Public outcry and anger were most visible on media sites, where hundreds of visitors, even those who identified themselves as believers, posted protests against the clergy’s vitriolic speeches.

The role of the church

The SPC became influential in Serbia when the former Yugoslavia collapsed and Milosevic loosened his communist anti-religion grip for the sake of gaining allies in his wars of the 1990s. The church joined him, following the official policy of Serbia that said it was only “defending Serbs living outside [the] mother country”, meaning in Croatia and Bosnia. Milosevic’s wars led to the deaths of more than 200,000 non-Serbs and deeply tarnished Serbia’s reputation.

Religious curriculum was introduced in Serbian schools in 2001, as the regime that replaced Milosevic’s wanted good relations with the SPC.

“The church used the void left by [the] collapse of previous values and lack of new ones in the war chaos of the nineties,” Zivica Tucic, an independent analyst and expert on religious matters, told IPS. During political and economic transitions and crises, “people have nowhere to turn to but the church,” he explained.

According to the 2011 census, 94 percent of 7.3 million Serbs were Orthodox, but analysts say that most people consider religion and nationality to be equal. As Milan Vukomanovic, a sociologist from the Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy, said, “The church has taken its place in the past two decades and one can hardly expect it to leave the space it obtained.”

“The phenomenon arose after direct ethnic mobilisation in former Yugoslavia in the wars of the nineties,” he added. Those wars were fought along ethno-religion lines – among Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks.

“Despite the fact that the war has ended many years ago, we still don’t see any engagement of the SPC in reconciliation, aid to the poor, et cetera,” Vukomanovic said.

The SPC clerics were widely engaged in wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Some of them went to battle or blessed troops that committed war crimes in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where about 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred in 1995.

Although the SPC is not immune to other kinds of scandals, Djordjevic pointed out that the “top clergy never goes to court”, and court practise in Serbia is to allow statute of limitations for cases involving clergy.

The SPC also has a court of its own, the so-called “canon court”, which debates certain cases and suppresses scandal by retiring or mildly disgracing controversial priests. Cases involving paedophilia or embezzlement of church funds rarely end before regular courts.

Despite video evidence of a bishop with young men, for example, or moving stories of suicide attempts by victims of Pahomije, a Serbian bishop, little was done to reach justice. Similarly, a purser at the Patriarchate of Belgrade who stole more than 1.5 million dollars also never went to court.

The public now awaits the traditional SPC assembly, due to be held from May 21 to June 3. The assembly resembles a church parliament that debates the most current developments in all dioceses.

A highly placed source at SPC who insisted on anonymity told IPS that the scandals would not be on the agenda, and when asked whether the accountability of Bishops Atanasije and Amfilohije for their rally speeches will be discussed, he responded, “That is out of question.”

On Apr. 19, Serbia and Kosovo put years of animosity aside when their prime ministers Ivica Dacic and Hashim Thaci initialled the first ever agreement between Belgrade and Pristina that should lead to normalisation of relations between the two former enemies.

The 15-point agreement, signed in Brussels, gives a certain degree of autonomy to some 100,000 Serbs who still live in Kosovo, a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008. Created under the auspices of the European Union, the accord is the culmination of 10 rounds of delicate negotiations that have lasted for six months.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele called the move “historic”, while Jelko Kacin, former Information Secretary of Slovenia and current EU official in charge of Serbia’s entry into the EU compared the event to the “end of the Cold War”.

On Friday, EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton told reporters in Brussels, “What we are seeing is a step away from the past and, for both of them, a step closer to Europe”, referring to the fact that the document effectively opens the door for Serbia to begin negotiations for EU membership, the political ambition of all its governments since the downfall of former dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

For Kosovo Prime Minister Thaci, the signing of the accord means, among other things, “the healing of wounds”, since it hinged upon the degree of autonomy Pristina was willing to grant to predominantly Serb regions in the north.

Until Yugoslavia fell apart in a series of bloody separatist conflicts in 1991, Kosovo – currently populated by 1.7 million ethnic Albanians and 100,000 Serbs – was a part of Serbia and under direct rule of the Serb minority in Belgrade.

An armed rebellion of ethnic Albanians aimed at obtaining independence from Belgrade in the 1990s led to brutal repression by Milosevic’s security forces, leaving 13,000 people dead.

In 1999, over a period of 11 weeks, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) dropped 50,000 bombs on 116 locations in southern Serbia and the Kosovo region in an effort to push out Milosevic’s forces. The bombing campaign was followed by the arrival of U.N. peacekeeping forces to oversee the province.

Fearing reprisals, almost half of Kosovo’s 200,000 resident Serbs fled to Serbia proper. Kosovo, meanwhile, went about building its first democratic institutions and unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008. It has so far been recognised by 96 nations, including the United States and many European countries with the notable exceptions of Spain and Cyprus.

Serbia vowed never to recognise the independent Kosovo, claiming the region represents the historic “origin” of the medieval Serbian state, though only 100,000 Serbs currently live there.

Serbia, together with its staunch ally Russia, has rejected Pristina’s authority and blocked the possibility of U.N. membership.

After years of failed attempts to impose central rule over several Serb-populated regions, Pristina finally agreed to the document initialled Friday.

The agreement allows for partial autonomy through the creation of Serb municipalities, which will have Serb-led police forces and a Serb-language judiciary and education system.

The accord also provides for the protection of medieval Serb Orthodox churches and monasteries, and effectively bans the entry of Kosovo armed forces into Serb populated areas, except during instances of natural disasters — and even then under the supervision of NATO peacekeeping forces, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in Brussels.

Still, “It’s hard to say whether this is a historic agreement”, Dusan Janjic, head of the Forum for Inter-Ethnic Relations, told IPS, adding the agreement represents only the beginning of a normalisation process “that will take many years”.

“But this is…a very positive and important event for Serbia, Kosovo, Europe and the region,” Janjic added.

For Ognjen Pribicevic , a researcher with the Institute for Social Sciences and Serbia’s former ambassador to Berlin, the success of this initiative depends on how Serbs in Kosovo respond to this newfound “autonomy”.

“The association of Serb municipalities is responsible for security and that is very important for local people,” he told IPS.

However, not all parts of Serbian society were happy with the Brussels agreement.

Nationalist parties are fiercely opposed to the move, with the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) saying the agreement represented “treason of national and state interests”.

“Serbs in Kosovo are left (at the mercy) of separatists and Kosovo was sold for the mere price of…beginning talks with the EU,” according to a DSS statement.

Social networks have been buzzing with reactions to the agreement, reflecting the deep division within Serbian society, with pro-European commentators expressing the belief that Kosovo was lost back in 1999, after the NATO bombing of Serbia, while nationalists and ultra-nationalists are calling for a “new war” that would bring Kosovo back into “the mother state”.

Prime Minister Dacic said that it is now up to the Serbian Parliament to approve the agreement, but did not specify when that might happen.

(END)

More than 10,000 people living in the coastal Adriatic town Dubrovnik have done what many others in the region could never. They are holding a referendum on a controversial development project that they believe endangers their city.

Dubrovnik is a sough after tourist destination in Croatia, and is listed as a United Nations Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage site since 1979 due to its historical beauty and charm. The medieval Adriatic town has 43,770 inhabitants, and is often dubbed the ‘Pearl of the Adriatic’.

“The number of signatures needed for the referendum has overcome our expectations,” member of the organisation Board for Call on Referendum Ivan Vidjen told IPS. Under Croatian law a referendum call is valid if organisers collect at least 20 percent of signatures of residents within a region.

The board collected more than 10,000 signatures in the past two weeks.

“Local people have recognised the idea of taking their fate into their own hands…we expected them to be interested in the issue (of a referendum), but did not expect their almost plebiscite response,” Vidjen said.

The referendum will be over a golf park being built on the 415 metres high Srdj hill overlooking Dubrovnik.

Participants in the referendum will have to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the following question: “Are you for the adoption of the spatial plan that foresees, apart from construction of a golf course, the construction of accommodation objects (villas, apartments, and hotels) on the plateau of Srdj hill?”

Earlier referenda in the Balkans usually dealt with issues such as secession of Croatia and other former Yugoslav republics in the early 1990s, which led to 1991-95 bloody wars in the Balkans, new constitutions of some nations such as Serbia, certification of the European Union (EU) membership in Croatia and Slovenia, or joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). As a rule, they were organised by ruling elites.

“This will be the first referendum initiated by citizens, stemming “from below”; people have shown they want to have a say in their local issues,” said Igor Miosic from board. “It’s also a sign that things were not right in the past 20 years and that democracy should go into their hands.”

Croatia gained independence in the wars of the 1990s, and entered a painful transition into a market economy. This led to mass privatisations, closure of once prosperous factories, legal or illegal land sales, emergence of tycoons, and mass unemployment.

Illegal construction along the Adriatic coast has devastated some of the most beautiful spots, and the people of Dubrovnik feared this might happen to them as well under the cloak of promoting tourism.

Croatia’s economy relies heavily on tourism, which brings some 7 billion dollars a year to the tiny nation of 4.2 million, blessed with a lovely Adriatic coast and stunning islands.

Investors have promised a project in Dubrovnik which would see 18 and nine hole golf courses, a sports centre, a hotel, tennis courts, a horse-riding club, restaurants, galleries, cycling and running tracks, bars and parks.

For the time being, Srdj hill hosts only a cable car from Dubrovnik to the Napoleon-era Imperial fortress on its top, a few souvenir shops, and the small village Bosanka with 20 private homes.

The Dubrovnik golf course was listed among 100 top development priorities by the government some six years ago, but the global economic crisis has slowed down the Israeli firm Golf d.o.o registered in capital Zagreb from investing almost a billion dollars in the Srdj project.

Over the years the area for the project grew from the original and legally approved 100 hectares to 300 hectares.

“It looks like it will host 268 villas and a 1,600 apartments complex, and the equivalent of 5,600 units of 60 square metres,” Marija Kojakovic, local architect said at a January panel on the Srdj golf course project. “Is it really what Dubrovnik needs at the moment?”

Several concerns have been expressed about the effect the development would have on Srdj environment and its biodiversity. The hill is now mostly forest and agricultural land. Home owners in Bosanka village said the expanded plan does not provide for small roads leading from their property to the nearby asphalt road.

“Our law on referendum calls for all collected signatures to be sent to the Public Administration Ministry in Zagreb, which has 60 days to bring a decision on approval for the referendum, and then send it to local authorities who are obliged to call it,” Vidjen said.

“We see no problems with investments coming to Dubrovnik and development of our town,” Vidjen said. “We have a problem with functioning of local authorities.”

“The Srdj hill project is one that defines the future of the town, and we were betrayed by the corrupt administration that does not work in the interest of the public,” said Slaven Tolj, who heads the local Art Workshop Lazareti.

The Golf d.o.o. head Maja Brinar has promised 1,500 new jobs for the local population. But the referendum organisers hope the referendum will halt the building plans.

Stojan Kovacevic spent last weekend going about his usual routine in his tiny dwelling in the village of Grocka, near Belgrade: cleaning the kitchen and bedroom, going to the local green market and watching TV.

Fausto Pocar, one of five international judges opposed the acquittal of Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Castro

But it was not as pleasant as it sounds. Kovacevic (55), a Serb who fled Croatia in 1995, has had no home of his own for 17 years now. He rents a tiny flat and does many odd jobs to survive.

And last Friday, a news item that came to him on his small television set has only added to his troubles.

On Nov. 16, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague, overturned the convictions of two 57-year-old Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, who had been sentenced in April 2011 to 24 and 18 years respectively for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The generals were pronounced guilty for their roles in the notorious Operation Storm, a four-day military offensive in August 1995 in which hundreds of Serb civilians were killed and over 200,000 expelled from the predominantly Serb region of Krajina in Croatia.

The operation ended the rebellion of Krajina Serbs against Croatia’s 1991-1995 independence drive from former Yugoslavia. It also signalled the end of centuries of Serb history in Croatia, as long columns of refugees on tractors and trucks flooded into Serbia.

That was how Kovacevic arrived in Grocka, a village 30 kilometres east of Belgrade, after putting his mother, father, sister and her three children into a small truck fleeing the Croatian artillery attacks on his hometown of Gracac.

Their home was later burned down, as were scores of others in the cities of Knin, Obrovac, and Benkovac.

Like most Krajina Serbs, Kovacevic and his family never went back.

The controversy over Operation Storm blocked Croatia’s road to membership in the European Union (EU) for years, and also impeded normalisation of relations between Croatia and neighbouring Serbia.

But the acquittal of the two generals last week suggests that the history of Operation Storm is about to be re-written; the decision led to a patriotic frenzy in Croatia and left thousands of Serbs flabbergasted.

“I have barely been able to sleep or eat since Friday, when I saw the broadcast from The Hague,” Kovacevic told IPS. “I felt a blow to the stomach and it won’t go away… My world fell apart once again and the sense of injustice will stay as long as I’m alive,” he added.

As Gotovina and Markac returned to their homeland last Friday to a heroes’ welcome – with Croatian President Ivo Josipovic declaring, “The generals are innocent” – the mood in Serbia was one of shock and disbelief, with President Tomislav Nikolic calling the acquittal “scandalous”.

Savo Strbac, head of the Documentation Centre ‘Veritas’, a representative group for Krajina Serbs in Belgrade, labelled the decision a “slap in the face”.

“It also looks as if everything surrounding international justice in cases of war crimes will (now) be called into question as well,” Natasa Kandic, a prominent Serbian human rights activist, told IPS.

“The court ruling did not bring justice to the victims,” she added.

Decision ‘undermines’ ICTY

Internal disagreements between judges within the appeals chamber have fanned the flames of controversy.

Two out of five international judges – Fausto Pocar and Karmel Agius – opposed the acquittal, standing against two important decisions made on Friday: that the indiscriminate shelling of Krajina towns was not unlawful and that there was no joint criminal enterprise (JCE) with Gotovina, Markac and the then Croatian head of state, Franjo Tudjman, to forcibly expel the Serb civilian population and settle the area with Croats.

JCE is a term established by the ICTY and represents the basis for most war crimes trials, including the trial of late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and the ongoing trials against ex-Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

More than 30 sentences by the ICTY, including one life sentence and several sentences of 35 and 40 years, used the JCE as a basis for judgements.

Judge Pocar said in his separate opinion in the appeals decision, “I fundamentally dissent from the entire appeal judgment, which contradicts any sense of justice.”

For Belgrade attorney Novak Lukic, who defends some indictees before the ICTY, “It’s unbelievable that judges could differ so much in opinion – both within the appeals chamber and in regard to the sentence pronounced previously by their colleagues.”

“The ICTY has basically changed its legal postulates with this acquittal; this sentence calls into question many other sentences dealing with deportations or evictions,” he told IPS.

For Katarina Subasic, an international journalist who covers war crimes, the acquittal could impact ongoing trials, such as those of Mladic and Karadzic, who stand accused of war crimes for the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, in July 1995.

“The idea of JCE has lost ground and that will undermine any process against military and political leaders (for the charge) of war crimes before the international courts…We see what is happening in Gaza now, Syria and what happened in Libya. The acquittal will bring controversy that will remain” and have echoes in future trials, she added.

According to the prominent historian Dubravka Stojanovic, “The acquittal shows that the ICTY can no longer represent the instrument of reconciliation in the region.”

“The ICTY was, for me, an instrument that could clear up some events from the wars (of the 1990s), involving all its participants (Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs),” she told IPS.

“Now it looks unwise to me; first a harsh JCE-based sentencing of 24 and 18 years, now an acquittal…the ICTY has lost credibility,” she concluded.

(END)

Renato Grbic is a simple Belgrade fisherman, who grew up on the shores of the Danube River in Belgrade, but he performs an additional job that he is not paid for.

In the last 14 years, 50-year-old Grbic has saved the lives of 25 people who were attempting to commit suicide by jumping into the river from Belgrade’s Pancevo Bridge.

“When I ask them why (they wanted to end their lives), they either say they were ‘depressed’ or they ‘could not take it any more’,” he told IPS. “Times are really hard for people today.”

Serbian Health Minister Slavica Djukic Dejanovic echoed Grbic’s words when she said, “By 2020, depression will be the second leading cause of absence from work.

“The current number of psychotherapists and psychiatrists is not enough to deal with the issue and we are making an effort to improve the situation soon,” she added in her opening address at a congress of mental health experts in Belgrade.

According to statistics from the ministry of health, this Eastern European nation of 7.2 million people has only 350 certified psychotherapists and 900 psychiatrists.

The Association of Psychotherapy Societies of Serbia puts the need for psychotherapists at between 6,000 and 8,000. Some 1,500 specialists are currently undergoing training and will be qualified to enter the system soon.

“Roughly a third of the population has experienced mental disorder due to the current economic crisis that has taken its toll in the form of unemployment and growing poverty,” Nadja Maric Bojovic, head of the Belgrade Psychiatry Clinic, told reporters.

Lingering trauma from the wars that ripped through the region in the 1990s, coupled with memories of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, as well as enduring hardships from economic stagnation during a period of international sanctions 1992-2000 have all compounded the issue.

“European statistics put the rate of mental disorders at 27 percent in 27 European Union member countries, with issues such as anxiety, insomnia and depression at the top of the list,” she added.

Concurring with largely accepted data by other experts in the field, she said that one in ten people with mental health issues has sought professional help.

“A large number of people have mental problems, but do not know how to solve them,” Zoran Milivojevic, head of the Association of Psychotherapy Societies of Serbia told IPS. In the absence of adequate professional services, “they take to tranquillisers instead, (leading to) large abuse of these substances.”

Ministry of health statistics suggest that the tranquilliser bromazepam (known in Serbia as ‘Bensedine’) was the most frequently prescribed drug in the country in 2011. Doctors prescribed 4.3 million packs of the product, with three million sold under the counter that same year, despite a prohibition law since 2002.

The tranquilliser lorazepam was the fifth most common prescription drug in 2011, with 1.6 million legally issued packs.

“They think it’s simply easier to take a drug than to try to solve problems with visits to therapists,” psychologist Nebojsa Jovanovic told IPS. “That calls for (increased) personal involvement.”

Serbian institutions have insufficient data on mental health issues, with the exception of precise statistics on suicides. There Serbia ranks 13th in the world, with 14 suicides per 100,000 people, according to statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Translated into annual statistics, this means that there were 1,400 suicides in Serbia in 2011, almost four per day.

But the only specialised centre for prevention of suicides – an emergency phone line in Belgrade  – ceased to exist in September due to a lack of finances.

“We had more than 2,300 calls from February 2011 until September this year,” Branka Kordic, the psychologist who was in charge of the project told IPS.

“We had no statistics on how many suicides we prevented, but most of the callers were men over 50 who had lost jobs, whom I’d call the biggest casualties of transition, who lost self-esteem, family support and the basic means of existence.”

Since 2000 Serbia has made a painful transition into the market economy, which accompanied by the last global crisis, led to a record unemployment rate of 25.5 percent.

The economic hardships and personal struggles have “been too long and too much for many,” Nebojsa Jovanovic told IPS.

A popular Serbian proverb quips that when it comes to politics there are as many opinions as there are people in this central European country of seven million.

But the adage was turned on its head last week when the masses sent a strong collective message to the government: no nickel exploitation in the country.

The controversy began when mining minister Milan Bacevic announced earlier this month that Mokra Gora – a 10,813-square-kilometre state-protected national park – and other areas in central Serbia contain more than four million tonnes of nickel deposits.

Bacevic went on to inform the public that several international companies were interested in exploiting the metal, bringing into the country investments totalling 1.44 billion dollars.

Like many nations in the region, Serbia is close to bankruptcy as a result of the global economic crisis. A new national government, elected to power in July, made a slew of promises to boost living standards and curb unemployment, which is currently at 25.5 percent, with 13.2 percent of the population living below the poverty line, according to the government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy for 2011.

Efforts to pull the country back from the brink of depression include plans to attract a diverse range of foreign investments, namely for nickel extraction projects.

The metal is used in thousands of everyday products by hundreds of millions of people. It is found in a range of commodities from batteries to computer hard disks. Stainless steel, which is used in cookware, cutlery, kitchen appliances, hardware, surgical instruments, storage tanks, firearms, car headlights, jewellery and watches, is a nickel-iron metal alloy.

As a result, nickel sells for close to 15,000 dollars per tonne.

But even a population struggling to make ends meet is not ready to accept the harsh environmental and social costs of the project.

“Nickel (extraction) technology is among the dirtiest in the world,” Vidojko Jovic, a professor at Belgrade University’s Mining and Geology Faculty, told IPS.

“It involves extraction (from the) ore, purification with sulphuric acid at adequate facilities, followed by the emission of gasses and water discharge that intoxicates nearby vegetation, as well as ground, underground and surface waters,” he added.

“There is no clean method for this. Pollution (from the extraction sites) spreads from 50 to 100 kilometres.”

The health hazards of nickel exploitation and production, which mostly affect local populations, include problems with the lungs and stomach, nausea and diarrhoea, among others.

A mass movement?

The issue gained wide public attention last week when the popular and internationally-renowned film director, Emir Kusturica, created the ‘Group for Protection of Serbia’ to raise awareness and garner public opposition to nickel extraction.

Kusturica, who is also director of the Mokra Gora national park, quickly elicited the support of mayors from the central Serbian towns of Topola, Arandjelovac and Vrnjacka Banja, the most popular tourist destinations and wine-growing locations in the country.

Kusturica believes that extracting nickel for export will have major health impacts on surrounding populations, without any of the revenue being reinvested in local communities.

Speaking to journalists in Mokra Gora last week, Kusturica lambasted a process that could lead to a “million deaths, just so that a billion dollars can be earned.”

Several top wine producers from the soon to be affected areas have also joined a growing movement to halt nickel mining.

“I won’t allow any digging or research around my vineyards,” Boza Aleksandrovic, owner of one of the biggest wineries in Serbia, told IPS.

“Serbia is exporting agricultural produce worth much more than the investment Bacevic promised; agriculture is our major export tool,” he stressed.

According to Jovic, major nickel producers like Canada have introduced sophisticated methods for nickel extraction, but such facilities “are not (possible) in densely populated areas like the ones in Serbia, which are surrounded by highly developed agricultural lands.”

Projects for nickel exploitation in Serbia were shelved twice in the past, in 1996 and 2006, due to environmental and possible health issues, despite offers by several multinational corporations.

But past expressions of public opposition never came close to harnessing the kind of mass support that Kusturica’s group has generated, with almost all media staunchly behind the movement in a rare instance of unity.

Photos of the Russian town of Norilsk, where almost a century of nickel exploitation has created a wasteland, flooded Serbian papers and news sites this month.

Almost all major media outlets also carried statistics from all over the world on health issues associated with nickel extraction.

Government deaf to opposition

Bacevic decided to counterattack the public on Friday, at a press conference supposedly aimed at “calming the nation”.

In his words, the technology to be used in Serbia would be “of highest sophistication” and completely different from that employed in Norilsk. He accused the media of using a “notorious scam” to “scare the public”.

“Media efforts, as well as attacks by individuals and lobbies amount to an attack on the government of Serbia,” according to the minister, adding that reporters have “deeply disturbed the public.”

As proof of the benefits of nickel production, the minister presented a black-and-white photograph of a nickel production factory in Kavadarci in neighbouring Republic of Macedonia, which allegedly turned the town of 29,000 into a prosperous one by producing 12,000 tonnes of nickel annually.

“It’s a pity there was no colour photo of Feni (the nickel plant in Kavadarci) and its surroundings,” Roberto Parizov, head of the Kavadarci-based environmental organisation ‘Eko Zivot’ (Eco Life) told IPS over the phone. “People here have been poisoned for decades.”

On Sunday the Macedonian paper ‘Utrinski Vesnik’ carried the statement of local engineer Blazo Boev, who said, “Kavadarci and its surroundings have been turned into a wasteland and dumpsite.”

“We wish that it (Feni) was never opened at all, but it is too late now,” Parizov said, in a sombre warning to Serbia.

(END)

After two months of waiting, people from the central Serbian town Valjevo followed the call of their bishop and went to local Orthodox Church to pray for rain.

“It wasn’t because I am religious, but because I didn’t know what else could help,” said Milan Stankovic (55), who attended the Sunday service. “Half of my raspberries are gone, half of the corn as well.”

And the rain fell in the night between Sunday and Monday all over the Balkans, bringing a little relief to a region where hundreds of thousands of farmers spent most of the summer looking at the sky through four heat waves since Jun. 1.

“All over the Balkans farmers are listing damage,” analyst Misa Brkic told IPS. “But nations of the region should admit they are doing almost nothing in regard to agricultural strategy…governments put agriculture high on their lists of priority, but only in words.”

The Commercial Chamber of Serbia (PKS) has put the damage from drought at 2.1 billion dollars. “Half of total plant production of Serbia was destroyed by this year’s drought,” PKS agriculture expert Vojislav Stankovic told journalists. This goes for corn, soy, wheat, fruit and vegetables.

Stankovic said Serbia, the biggest agricultural producer in the region, needs to invest 2 billion dollars in the irrigation systems that currently cover only 200,000 hectares, or four percent of arable land. The coverage needs to be taken up to two million hectares, he said.

Agriculture is Serbia’s most profitable export branch, and netted in 2 billion dollars in 2011.

“That substantially supported the national budget, but this year will see nothing alike,” Brkic said.

“Harvest losses do not mean only that we’ll have to be careful with use of agricultural produce,” head of the Product Exchange, Zarko Galetin, told IPS. “Those losses transfer into reduced produce of meat, eggs, milk etc., and higher prices of food.”

Consumers in Serbia have already felt the impact, with two hikes in the price of meat of about five percent each in just the past two weeks.

Irrigation has proved difficult. “Our wells have lower levels,” said Mirjana Kiric (35), a vendor at the biggest open air green market Kalenic in Belgrade. “We use old pumps and can almost hear the ground slurping the water.”

In neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina, comprising the Croat-Muslim Federation and the Serb dominated Republic of Srpska, there is no joint agriculture ministry. Soil temperatures in the south have hit 47 degrees Celsius, and the government has estimated damage to crops at almost a billion dollars. Farming accounts for 20 percent of employment in the country, where unemployment stands at 48 percent.

“The situation has not been this bad since the end of the (1992-95) war,” Jovan Jankovic (65) from Ljubovija told IPS over the phone. “Corn will be as rare as gold here.”

The World Bank (WB), which in May approved a 40 million dollars loan to improve the irrigation system in Bosnia, said then that the countries of the Balkans had “huge agricultural potential, but lacked the infrastructure and strategy.”

“Former Yugoslavia used to have one of the most advanced irrigation and drainage systems,”

said Holger Kray, the WB’s lead official for agriculture and rural development in Europe and Central Asia. “Unfortunately, these systems have degraded, eroded,” Kray told Belgrade media.

In Croatia, less than one percent of arable land (16,000 hectares) is being irrigated. Agriculture Minister Radimir Cacic admitted to local media last week that the country’s approach to agriculture is like that of “primitive tribes”.

“If there’s rain, there will be crops, there will be electricity. If there is drought, there’ll be nothing. This has to change,” he told Croatian Radio Television (HRT).

So far little has been done in that direction. The only ray of hope for Croatia is the European Union (EU) funds that will become available when it becomes the 28th EU member in July next year.

The drought has had a severe impact on energy production. Hydropower plants have had to scale down due to low water levels. In Serbia, electricity production has fallen 20 percent.

Low river levels have led to a slowdown in international shipment on the Danube and Sava rivers.

Fires as a result of the drought have destroyed large tracts of forests and bush in Bosnia, on the Croatian Adriatic coast, and in Montenegro and Serbia. Some of the fires raging on the border between Serbia and Kosovo are still beyond control because mines left over from the war over the former Serbian province make the area inaccessible.

“Whoever we have to thank for the rain, we do,” Milan Stankovic told IPS. “But it came too late and in such small quantities that it was of little consolation.”

In the decade following the break-up of Yugoslavia, it was rare for a statement made by a foreign politician to stir heated debate in the Eastern European bloc.

Since 2001, the independent nations of former Yugoslavia have been focused on rebuilding their economies from the rubble of simultaneous and protracted conflicts throughout the region and geopolitics have largely been confined to the slow process of reconciliation among neighbouring states.

But the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s proclamation last week that Bosnia-Herzegovina is now in the “care” of his country generated much public controversy in the Balkan states of Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.

“Bosnia and Herzegovina is entrusted to us,” Erdogan told a meeting of the provincial heads of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara last week.

He recalled a statement made by the former Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first president, when Erdogan visited him on his deathbed in 2003. “He (Izetbegovic) whispered in my ear these phrases: ‘Bosnia (and Herzegovina) is entrusted to you (Turkey). These places are what remain of the Ottoman Empire’,” he said.

Izetbegovic, who led Bosnia into the war of independence in 1992 and subsequently became the country’s first president, died of a heart disease in 2003.

The thought of being passed off as a ‘trust’ to any country is enough to spark intense opposition but the statement is made worse by the fact that Bosnia is home to a highly diverse population comprising various ethno-religious communities including Bosniak Muslims, Catholic Bosnian Croats and Orthodox Serbs as well.

The latter two groups make up more than half of Bosnia’s population of four million. For them, the 500 years of Turkish-Ottoman rule that ended only with the collapse of the empire at the end of World War I are remembered almost exclusively as a period of severe oppression.

Bosnian Serb politicians were quick to voice their anger over the statement.

“Bosnia-Herzegovina is not a land to be inherited,” Igor Radojicic, a spokesman for the Bosnian Serb Parliament stressed, while Bosnian Croat leader Dragan Covic told local media he doubted that “Izetbegovic could be so powerful as to believe he has a country to give (away) as a trust.”

The controversy quickly went viral online, with websites in the region becoming the battlegrounds for a war of words between various ethnic groups.

United against Muslims, non-Muslims expressed outrage against the statement and open fear about the influence of Islam in the region.

“People who are not of Islamic faith tend to be surprised when they see many women in Sarajevo dressed in traditional Islamic ways, with scarves or even in abayas, as Bosnia was a secular country before the wars of the ‘90s,” Zijad Jusufovic (47), a tour guide in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, told IPS.

“But there are also others signs that are not yet visible (to a majority of the population) – for instance unemployed men get financial support if they become regular mosque goers, war widows get financial support as well – up to 600 dollars – if they and their children become devout Muslims.

“That began in the 90s, as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Malaysia (began) to support Muslims here,” he added.

Pragmatic foreign policy

Belgrade historian Slavenko Terzic told the leading Serbian daily ‘Politika’ that Erdogan’s proclamation was “a dangerous statement for the Balkans”.

His colleague, Cedomir Antic, described the move as “an unprecedented provocation” that should be “officially renounced by Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia”.

But for analysts and experts, the statement by the Turkish Prime Minister came as no surprise.

“The statement represents a political reality: that (Turkey) considers the Balkans a priority in its ambitious foreign policy,” Darko Tanaskovic, an expert in oriental studies at the University of Belgrade, told IPS.

For Voja Lalic, a veteran journalist who dedicated his career to Turkey, Erdogan’s statement was “neither accidental, nor unexpected”.

“The (AKP) government is trying to impose itself as a regional power in areas of the former Ottoman Empire, not only in the Balkans, but in the Middle East and former Soviet republics of Islamic background as well,” Lalic told IPS.

“Perhaps the statement about ‘legacy’ was a little counterproductive for Turkey’s long-term interests,” Tanaskovic told IPS, especially since it raised fears in Bosnia about Ankara’s expansionist mindset.

He added, however, that Turkey’s foreign policy is distinguished by a high degree of pragmatism, referred to by historians and analysts as ‘Neo-Osmanism’. Tanaskovic described this ideology as a mix of Islamism, Turkish nationalism and Osman imperialism, a foreign policy strategy that is “nostalgic for imperial times”, he told IPS.

“It is (this) pragmatism that dominates Turkey’s foreign policy,” Lalic says. “Turks are excellent traders and they use that skill always and everywhere,” he added.

Sarajevo columnist Borivoje Simic recently wrote, “Private capital, interested in profit only, which does not differ between nations, colours or race, has yet to enter Bosnia. So far, this country has not proven to be a stable, comfortable place for investment, despite the ‘political love’ that has been expressed by many, including Turkey.”

But a brief look at Turkey’s economic presence in the Balkans shows that this is now changing. According to Turkey’s economic ministry, trade between Turkey and the countries in the Balkans grew from 2.9 billion dollars in 2000 to 18.4 billion dollars in 2011.

At the same time, direct investment into these nations grew from 30 million dollars in 2002 to 189 million in 2011.

“Out of the 1.8 million dollars invested abroad in 2011, seven percent went to the Balkans,” according to Turkish offocials. This money was poured into diverse industries such as communications, banking, construction, mining and retail sectors.

Culturally, too, Turkey’s presence in the Balkan’s is increasing rapidly.

“Turkish soap-operas have (become more popular than) South American shows,” Tanaskovic told IPS.

“It is this strategy (so-called ‘soft power’) that creates a positive image about Turkey,” he said in reference to the dozens of Turkish TV series that currently rule the Balkans’ screens.

Millions were glued to their TV screens from February until June this year, when the first 55 episodes of a saga on Suleiman the Magnificent aired in the region. Stories of the 16^th century ruler and his court immediately captured the hearts of thousands of citizens.

Such was the popularity of these shows that various sociologists began to study the phenomenon.

“The Turkish oriental element presents a shared and familiar atmosphere for millions, harkening back to a collective cultural identity, and even elements of a common language, that have survived for centuries,” according to Lalic.

Turkey has also opened two universities in Bosnia – the International University of Sarajevo (IUS) and the International Burch University (IBU), the latter established by private individuals that include Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen.

“The growing popularity of the Turkish seaside is also an indicator” of closer ties, Lalic added.

The Turkish seaside ranks third among Serbs, whose favourite holiday destinations have hitherto been Montenegro or Greece. Now the Turkish Mediterranean coast is attracting thousands: 140,000 Serbs flew there in the first half of the year, with more tourists expected in the coming months.

“It is such fun to be in Turkey,” said Ivana Djuraskovic (40), who plans to re-visit the Turkish resort of Bodrum this year.

“When I hear ‘Turkish’ words, which are Serbian as well, such as sanduk (box), kapija (gate), hajde (come on), taman (enough), carsav (linen), secer (sugar), kackavalj (cheese) or kralj (king), I feel at home,” she added.

(END)

As the Danube naturally flows through Serbia. Credit: Vesna Zimonjic/IPS.

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jun 30 2012 (IPS)

Wildlife is being increasingly threatened around the Danube river, the “Amazon of Europe”. The need for profit is taking over from the need to protect natural resources along the river.

Austria and Croatia are engaged in a major project to tame the Danube, to ‘correct’ its meandering stream into a straight one to facilitate commercial shipping along the river to the Black Sea.

“Threats to wildlife are serious,” head of the Worldwide Fund for Nature in Serbia Duska Dimovic told IPS. “Wildlife is trans-border; birds and fish go freely between Serbia and Croatia. Major works in one of the countries will influence all the immediate neighbours along the river.”

This Amazon of Europe comes with 800,000 hectares of green belt along its banks and those of its tributaries, the Drava and Mura, in five countries – Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia.

This is a unique natural reserve of floodplain and wetland wildlife, home to a third of the region’s plant species, half of fish and mammal species and 63 percent of bird species.

Colonies of rare white tailed eagles, little tern, black stork, beaver and otter thrive in the area. The ship sturgeon here is nearly extinct but survives. The rare red deer can also be sighted coming to the riverbank.

And thousands of families depend on the Danube through fishing and cultivation, which is tuned to the river’s flooding and ebbing.

Commercial considerations threaten all this. The almost 3,000 km Danube connects the European continent from the West to the East. The 10 nations along its banks (Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine) rely on it for cheap transport of goods.

Directly or indirectly, the Danube serves more than 40 European nations to move millions of tonnes of goods from Western Europe to the Black Sea annually. The river is linked to the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal that begins in the Rhine Delta in Rotterdam (the Netherlands).

“The interest of major European countries in commercial shipping is understandable,” says economist Nebojsa Savic. “Transport of trucks on huge barges is 14 times cheaper than sending them by road, and five times cheaper than putting them on trains.” A barge can carry up to 100 trucks. Commercial transport on the Danube has risen 27 percent in the past two years, according to the Statistics Office of Serbia.

The Danube runs 600 kilometres through Serbia. It enters in the north, from Hungary, forms the natural north-western border with Croatia, and flows further to Romania.

Major new works to straighten the slow flow of the winding Danube comprise building of groynes, T-shaped barriers which prevent meandering and the shifting of river banks, and also the creation of natural sand islands in the middle. But such works can also completely change the eco-system of the area. Birds and fish, and animals as well, lose their natural habitat and leave or even die, environmentalists warn.

Austria has built several dozen groynes along 49 kilometres of the Danube east of Vienna at a cost of 274 million dollars. Pressures by Hungarian environmentalists have prevented a similar same project in that country.

According to international plans for Danube regulation, Croatia could build 53 groynes along its 53 km of the river. The new government that took over earlier this year has yet to take a decision on this proposal, which is strongly opposed by environmentalists.

“That would mean the certain death of Kopacki Rit, for example,” says Arno Mohl, conservation expert from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, who visited the region last week.

Kopacki rit, situated near the confluence of the Drava river and the Danube in Croatia, is a unique natural habitat for more than 260 bird species. Among them are the great white egret and the European green woodpecker. Many fish and insect species thrive here as well.

“Let us hope that Croatia and Serbia will not make the mistake my country made in the 1970s and 1980s with regulation of the Danube flow,” Mohl added. He is from Austria, which began the project of taming the river decades ago.

In Serbia it remains unclear what will happen in the near future. General elections were held on May 6, but the country still has no government, and may not for more than a month.

Former university graduates, current students and professors are embroiled in an unusual scandal this exam season, as news reports filtering in from around the Balkans reveal a major online trade in stolen final papers.

“I was shocked when I recognised my final paper, with only its title changed, posted on the website of my (Alma Mater) and credited to another person,” said Jelena Stojanovic (31), who graduated from the Belgrade Technology Faculty six years ago.

“I contacted the girl listed as the author and she admitted to buying the paper for 3,000 dinars (33 dollars) on a site that offers a database of final papers in all areas (of study),” Stojanovic told IPS. “I protested to my faculty, but they said it’s currently impossible to establish if the graduation paper is forged or not.”

Under the current education system, high schools and most university faculties require students to complete extensive final papers in order to be eligible for graduation. But the requirement appears to be too much effort for many, who are turning to the digital world for a quick fix to their end-of- semester blues.

Stojanovic is just one of thousands of graduates whose final papers have appeared on the seemingly enormous number of sites that offer term papers for a sum of 33-110 dollars, depending on the area of expertise. Short midterm papers or high school essays are sold for about five dollars.

‘Customers’ are offered the option of paying online using Serbian dinars, Croatian kunas, Bosnian marks and euros for Montenegro, as the database is easily able to serve Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins due to the similar language spoken throughout the region.

The market is huge and covers an area of more than 15 million people. Serbia alone has a population of a million students at all levels of education.

“I believe that the universities’ practice of posting graduation papers online is being abused,” Stojanovic said. “But there’s no way to prove it or take legal action.”

So far, there is no clear law governing this kind of scheme in Serbia or anywhere else in the region. Experts say the laws are slow to follow the developments of modern technology.

“For the time being, the only way (to avoid the scandal) would be to register one’s graduation paper as intellectual property and sue those who use it illegally,” according to Vladimir Maric, from the Institute for Intellectual Property.

In the meantime, the business of obtaining online final papers appears to be flourishing.

Creators of the databases seem to have access to some of Serbia’s biggest Internet providers – thousands of netizens recently received an e-mail offering a shopping spree at a site with readymade graduation papers for high schools and various university faculties.

The papers on offer covered 44 areas, ranging from short essays on Serbian writers to highly sophisticated works on the history of Serbian international relations to analyses of technological processes in the textile industry.

Users must register and pay a small membership fee in order to gain access to the site, but they in turn are given no information about the site’s operators.

It was only recently that Serbia was “able to ban mobile phones and ensure that sophisticated equipment such as bugs were excluded from final exams,” said economics professor Rade Mitrovic.

“But we seem to be one step behind the imagination of students and their helpers,” he added.

Though there are no formal laws on cheating in Serbia, students caught doing so can be prevented by teachers at any education level – be it high school or university – from sitting the exam. They are usually allowed to take the exam the following semester.

So far, only one site with contents described as “illegal” has been shut down in Serbia and that too only because the Association of Serbian Publishers decided to push for closure of the site, which contained e-books by both domestic and international authors; universities and high schools have yet to take action.

Meanwhile, the public was recently stunned by the discovery that various degrees were forged as well.

“We recently checked some 2,000 diplomas (belonging to workers at) the electricity company of Montenegro,” said Velimir Tmusic, head of the inspection in Belgrade. “About 10 percent were forged, mostly from the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Economics in Pristina.”

In the past decades, many Montenegrins studied in Serbia or in Kosovo, so the check had to be carried out in Belgrade. Pristina, now Kosovo’s capital, was under the Serbian education system until 1999.

“Most of the forgeries were from the 90s,” Tmusic added, referencing the decade when lawlessness was common in the war-torn region.

Now, a simmering scandal about the newly elected president Tomislav Nikolic (60) is adding to the confusion.

Nikolic’s official biography says he graduated in 2007, and obtained a Master’s degree in 2011 at the Faculty for Management in the northern town of Novi Sad.

However Nikolic himself claimed that in 2007 he was studying at the Faculty of Law in his native Kragujevac. He was also unable, during a recent TV interview, to name a single professor at his alleged alma mater in Novi Sad. The public is still waiting for the president to clear these lingering doubts.

(END)

Serbs awoke on Monday morning to a regime change. A close ballot in the presidential run-off Sunday spelled the end for incumbent Boris Tadic, who served two terms as head of the Democratic Party that toppled former dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, as Serbs cast their votes for the populist Tomislav Nikolic, who begins his five-year term today.

Nikolic (60) heads the populist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and his victory was described last night by analysts as “a political earthquake”, leaving swathes of the public in shock as the long-celebrated Democratic Party stepped down.

The Democrats began the process of ending Milosevic’s bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s, which took more than 100,000 lives.

But even a glorious past could not secure Tadic’s popularity against the wave of economic and political hardship that has gripped the country since the latter came to power in 2004, analysts say.

“The loss of presidency (for Tadic) came as a result of enormous dissatisfaction among the people, as the economic and social situation has (deteriorated) in the past years, with the President and his (ruling) party doing little to ease the burden,” analyst Ognjen Pribicevic told IPS. “Besides, all these hardships are accompanied by growing accusations of corruption that is eating away at the substance of society,” he added.

Unemployment in Serbia has stood stubbornly at 24 percent for years now, the highest in decades, while Serbian tycoons from the grim 90s era have flourished under the new rulers, privatising hundreds of companies and then leading them into bankruptcy due to a lack of international investment, particularly since 2008.

Impoverished state coffers led to the decay of the health care system, education and social services. In an effort to improve the situation, Serbia began borrowing money and ended up with a foreign debt of 31 billion dollars for a nation of 7.3 million people.

The first sign of widespread dissatisfaction with Democrats came two weeks ago in the parliamentary elections and first round of presidential elections. Tadic’s party obtained 23 percent of the votes, while Nikolic’s Progressives came in as the single biggest party with 24 percent, unable, however, to form a coalition government.

The new Serbian government will be formalised next month, comprised of Tadic’s Democrats, Socialists and a small Liberal-Democratic party.

“We’ll have a cohabitation in the future, with a Progressive president and a government again headed by the Democrats,” analyst Misa Brkic told IPS. He believes this won’t be a bad thing, with opposing sides acting as a system of checks and balances against one another.

The poll booths saw an extremely low turnout on Sunday, with barely 45 percent of the electorate turning up to cast a vote. Still, Nikolic won 49.8 and Tadic 47 percent of the votes.

“(Tadic) was punished by former Democrat supporters – the intellectuals (and) middle class,” political analyst Jovo Bakic told IPS.

“They expressed clear antipathy to the Democratic Party’s practices in the past years – including nepotism (and) favouritism of close presidential aides. Tadic did exactly what Milosevic did in his final years, concentrated power around him, and the majority of voters expressed their disgust by not going to the polls at all,” he added.

According to the constitution, the President of Serbia has no executive powers – rather, he or she is expected to objectively represent the nation at home and abroad, sign and thus approve laws adopted by Parliament, name ambassadors and receive foreign ambassadors and decide on a number of state matters.

But as far as the broader Serbian public was concerned, Tadic had long overstepped those boundaries.

In his victory speech, Nikolic said he would “adhere to the Constitution and respect institutions”, in a clear reference to widespread opposition to Tadic’s abuse of power.

According to analyst Slavisa Lekic, “Tadic’s interference was visible in the work of government (institutions), courts and (much more).”

“Part of the intellectual public wanted to sacrifice Tadic for the improvement of democracy,” Lekic said.

“I want a normal Serbia, a country where one day I can be replaced,” Nikolic said last night, in a nod to the democratic future he has promised.

Nikolic also said, “Serbia will not stray from its European path,” since the nation secured European Union candidacy last March.

He added that his priorities now were “Moscow, Brussels and Washington, not certainly in this order,” as he was willing to cooperate with European nations and the United States, but also with Russia, considered one of Serbi’s “traditional” political allies.

Nikolic added that he would ask for a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel since “Germany is Serbia’s main ally in the European Union.”

“I will nourish good relations with all our neighbours,” Nikolic said, referring to the fact that post-war relations between the countries of former Yugoslavia are still seeing their ups and downs.

“Serbs and Croats should live in peace,” he said about the two biggest nations of former Yugoslavia that were at war in the beginning of the 90s.

(END)

As the May 6 date for Serbia’s general election inches closer, two young Belgrade playwrights have capitalised on the electoral war of words between the pro-European camp and conservative nationalists to highlight the dark side of propaganda and expose the omnipotence of party membership.

For the last few months, the airwaves and newspapers in Serbia have been thick with promises of a ‘better life’ for a nation struggling with aftershocks of the economic crisis, high unemployment and a painful transition to a market economy.

Election pledges also touch on rebuilding democracy and all its attendant institutions, which came into being only after the downfall of the country’s former leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 and have since suffered from a lack of efficiency, transparency and accountability.

Amidst the turmoil, Maja Pelevic (31) and Milan Markovic (33), whose plays are staged in several prominent Belgrade theatres, offered what they described as a new “cultural and marketing strategy”, which was quickly snapped up by every major political party in Serbia and propelled the two young artists into positions of political authority.

What politicians and the media failed to recognise was that the duo’s text, ‘Idea, Strategy, Movement’, was lifted right out of a 1928 speech by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, entitled ‘Knowledge and Propaganda’.

“Everyone reacted positively,” Pelevic told IPS. “The nationalists and conservatives were the most open to us, as they have few young people in their parties. Others put us on their ‘cadre lists’,” she added.

The two presented their work to the broader public last week in Belgrade and in return were offered high positions in the various cultural councils of ruling coalition members including the centrist Democratic Party (DS), the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), and the pro-European Union Social Democratic Party (SDP).

The playwrights were also invite to advise the nationalist, opposition Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) and the biggest opposition group, the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). The newly formed United Regions of Serbia (URS) also took them in, as did the increasingly popular leftist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

The LDP even put the young dramatists’ strategy on its website.

Culture trumps politics

The playwrights said it would be intriguing to see if anyone would recognise Goebbel’s text.

“We replaced Hitler’s name with Vojislav Kostunica (the DSS leader), as his party asked for a text to explain our ideas on development of culture,” Pelevic said.

“We also replaced the words ‘national socialism’ with ‘democracy’ and ‘propaganda’ with ‘political marketing’ and it worked fine,” she added.

The excerpts the playwrights chose to pull from the speech deal with Goebbels’ ‘theory’ of propaganda, in which he stresses that people are drawn together and then slowly indoctrinated with “creative ideas”; a theory that rests largely on the importance of political power to get ideas across to mass audiences.

None of the parties seemed disturbed by the text’s totalitarian ideology that most democratic societies now fight against, “such as gaining power at any cost; spreading one’s idea into the very pores of society and (carrying) out a ruthless propaganda campaign,” Markovic said.

“Another of our aims (with the social experiment) was to see if we could move up (the economic ladder) if we joined political parties,” Markovic said, since “it is impossible to work in Serbia now as an art director, or even a writer without the support of the party.”

For many years, Serbian culture has fallen victim to the tough economic climate, constantly side- tracked by one regime after another since Milosevic’s downfall. Budgetary cuts for culture are huge, with dozens of theatres, movies production houses and even the Philharmonic orchestra being left with small sums of money, barely enough to cover staff salaries.

On the other hand, party membership has become extremely important, swallowing up various aspects of social and economic life. Employment has been tied so tightly to party membership that, now, some of the biggest opposition parties are brandishing slogans such as ‘Jobs for all, not only party members’, or ‘No more employment through party membership’.

For sociologists, the link between party membership and the playwrights’ success comes as no surprise.

“Old habits die hard,” cultural sociologist Stjepan Gredelj told IPS. “In the communist era, party membership was important for employment. Although we have had a multi-party system for more than 20 years now, the line of thought remains much the same in the generation of new politicians as well.”

“Party loyalty works two ways,” added sociology professor Ratko Bozovic. First, by placing its own members and supporters in key positions, the party ensures its line is followed closely, while also “keeping an eye on its workers”.

Secondly, “party members are safe in their positions and privileges. Democracy is a feeble plant that has yet to develop and grow here…we still live in partocracy. The cultural (stunt pulled) by Pelevic and Markovic has only confirmed that,” he added.

Both sociologists agree that the situation is the same in nations of former Yugoslavia, such as Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina and even Slovenia, the only country from the former bloc to become a member of the European Union (EU).

Ivan Tasovac, director of the Belgrade Philharmonic, has also seized on the moment of controversy to expose just how far politics have infringed on cultural space in the country.

Tasovac, who has been selected as “man of the year” several times in the past decade by media workers, promised the votes of all 100 musicians from the prominent cultural institution to the political party that could provide the most money for the new Philharmonic concert hall – a promise that every regime has made for two decades – and prove that one of its top officials attended a single Philharmonic concert in the past four years, since the last elections were held.

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic and - -
VRANJE, Serbia, Mar 15 2012 (IPS)

The region of former Yugoslavia has developed a new phenomenon in response to economic hardships that continue to linger in Europe years after the climax of the global financial crash in 2008.

Serbs travel up to 100 kilometres to the Bulgarian open-air market Ilijanci to buy cheap clothes and shoes. Credit: Vesna Peric Zimonjic/IPS

“Once a month I go to Macedonia to fill my fridge,” Milan Jankovic (72), a pensioner from Vranje, told IPS. “The bus ticket is only 300 dinars (3.5 dollars) and for 20,000 dinars (roughly 284 dollars) I bring home two full bags of processed cheese, preserved meat, Pâté and long lasting diary products that would cost me my whole pension, 30,000 dinars (351 dollars), here,” he added.

The Macedonian town of Kumanovo, located only 50 kilometres away from Vranje, is the primary target for shoppers like Jankovic and many others.

“With current sales of winter clothes (sometimes marked down by as much as 70 percent) I think my wife and I will get at least one new coat each,” Jankovic said.

His story is typical for many Serbs who live in towns close to neighbouring countries. But even people from southern Serbian towns such as Nis and Pirot travel some 100 kilometres to the Bulgarian open-air market Ilijanci, close to the border with Serbia, while Bulgarians travel to neighbouring Serbian towns as well.

Serbs say that clothes and shoes are 30 percent cheaper in Bulgaria, while Bulgarians find Serbian food much more affordable.

“Even when I calculate the cost of petrol from Sofia (the Bulgarian capital) to Pirot, it’s cheaper to buy fresh meat or preserved meat products; everything has become so expensive in Bulgaria,” Ivan Mitev (39) told IPS.

A local butcher who declined to give his name said, “On Saturdays or Sundays we only see Bulgarians in our shops; that saves our business, as our people (Serbs) have less and less money.”

Apart from the lure of cheap food, Croats come to Serbia very often in order to buy cigarettes, which are the cheapest in the region at an average price per package of between one and 1.5 dollars. In Croatia, which is poised to join the EU next year, the price could be anything upwards of 2.6 dollars.

Vladimir Stojanovic, head of the Serbian customs office for Gradina, the biggest border crossing into Bulgaria, confirmed that shopping tourism is flourishing.

“Bulgarians buy food here, while our people buy textiles and leather products there. Also, Serbs buy LED TVs in Bulgaria for about 300 euros (390 dollars), while their regular price in Serbia is between 450 (585) to 500 euros (650 dollars),” he said.

Customs regulations for cross-border trade with all Serbian neighbours state that taxes are only paid on purchases exceeding ‘private purposes’. So most people bringing in single TVs, a few bags of food or a couple pairs of shoes are able to shop tax-free.

Furthermore, regulations in Bulgaria and Hungary – members of the European Union (EU) – allow for local value added tax (VAT) to be deducted from the price of goods if the total purchase exceeds 150 euros (195 dollars); shoppers get their money back at special exit counters on the borders.

“That’s what makes it worth it to go to Szeged,” Slobodan Kordic (52) from the Northern Serbian town of Subotica, told IPS. Szeged is the first Hungarian town across the border, only 40 kilometres away from Subotica.

“I bought my teenage son a pair of winter shoes for only 2700 dinars (31 dollars) at a sale, while at home I’d pay 10,000 dinars (117 dollars),” Kordic said, adding that this represented a huge saving on household income.

People from the Western Serbian town of Loznica found that buying spare car parts and tyres in the Bosnian town of Bijeljina is worth the effort. The prices are 20 percent lower, and the 17 percent VAT return makes the idea very attractive for many.

“Besides, filling the petrol tank in Bosnia is also much cheaper,” said Zoran Smijanovic (34) from Loznica. The price per litre of top quality Euro-premium petrol is 1.6 dollars in Bosnia while in Serbia it has been 1.95 dollars as of March 12.

“It doesn’t look like much, but saving several thousand dinars a month on petrol or much more on clothes and shoes for children means a lot,” Brkic said. “This helps people manage, particularly in the border regions of the South, which are among the poorest (parts of the country),” he added.

Serbia has the lowest average income in the region, about 390 dollars per month. The introduction of the market economy in 2000 meant an influx of foreign goods, to which the state attached high taxes in order to fill its own coffers.

A return to the visa-free travel system for the EU countries in 2009 provided many Serbs with the opportunity to go across the border and shop for less money.

Although taxes have been gradually decreasing since 2008, particularly since Serbia gained candidate status for EU membership this year, prices remain high in a nation that has grown poorer in the past years.

Since the downturn of the economy in 2008, individual purchasing power has declined to its lowest level since 2000.

“Purchasing power in Serbia declined by at least a third in 2011, with huge loss of jobs and limited family incomes,” economic analyst Misa Brkic told IPS. “Most of the prices here have remained the same, while people have less and less money to buy anything besides the (basic) necessities, such as food. That is why Serbia is so cheap for neighbours,” he added.

Average net salaries stand at 956 dollars in Croatia, 455 dollars in Bulgaria and 520 in Bosnia- Herzegovina.

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic and - -
BELGRADE, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Serbia has reached its historic goal of becoming a European Union (EU) member candidate after being a pariah state for years. But analysts warn that the undisputed political success may not bring immediate results.

Many obstacles remain on the road to becoming an EU member by way of tuning laws to match EU legislation, and eradicating corruption and organised crime.

A survey by the Serbian European Integration Office (SEIO), the government body for EU integration, also shows that Serbia is deeply split over EU membership, with 51 percent of citizens supporting it. This is the lowest level of support in 12 years since the downfall of former president Slobodan Milosevic.

“People are more sceptical than the politicians,” analyst Srdjan Bogosavljevic told IPS. “If one could tell them in 2000 that EU membership means salvation for the economy, they know it’s not the case now.”

Analyst Djordje Vukadinovic says Serbs are looking closely at nearby Greece, where half a million among a Serbian population of seven million spend their summers.

“Irresponsible politicians presented the EU, in the past, as the beacon of development,” Vukadinovic told IPS. “Since Greece has fallen into debt, and news on brutal bailout methods has been all over the media, scepticism is normal. The main question is – what is the price ordinary people have to pay.”

Economist say the candidate status brings Serbia closer to the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) funds that could bring 200 million euros (265 million dollars) in investment.

“Forty million euros (53 million dollars) are ready to be invested into agriculture from 2014,” agriculture minister Dusan Petrovic told journalists. “It does not seem so much now, but bearing in mind that agriculture is the most successful production activity, this means a real boost.”

Agriculture is the only profitable export, earning 2.4 billion dollars in 2011. The growth rate in agriculture has been between 18 and 27 percent over the past decade.

The biggest opponents of EU membership are hard-line nationalists who want to keep traditional values and the Serb identity alive. For them, steps that bring Serbia closer to the EU mean loss of national identity and submission to the West.

Vojislav Kostunica, leader of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), and prime minister for 2004-2008 has said this is not a moment for celebration. “Who can celebrate the candidacy now?” he said in a statement. “People who have no jobs, who have become very poor…Status represents an empty word with the high price paid.”

Kostunica was referring to Serbia’s agreement last week that Kosovo, its breakaway province, could have full representation in international meetings, despite the fact that Serbia opposes the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008.

“In order to get the candidate status, we had – de facto and de jure – to recognise the independence of Kosovo,” deputy leader of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party Dragan Todorovic said in a statement. “Stories of economic prosperity with the EU membership candidacy are just empty talk.”

Belgrade University professor Zarko Korac believes “there is little will for change.”

“There was and there remains in Serbia the constant battle between the conservatives that don’t want to change anything, and progressives who want improvement and change,” Korac told IPS. “This is the case now, again. The bad thing is that the former are very strong, like the Serbian Orthodox Church, for example.”

“Things will change (with the candidacy), of course,” Korac added, “But not as much, as fast, as many would like.”

Excerpt:

Serbia has reached its historic goal of becoming a European Union (EU) member candidate after being a pariah state for years. But analysts warn that the undisputed political success may not bring immediate results.

 Many obstacles remain on the road to becoming an EU member by way of tuning laws to match EU legislation, and eradicating corruption and organised crime.

A survey by the Serbian European Integration Office (SEIO), the government body for EU integration, also shows that Serbia is deeply split over EU membership, with 51 percent of citizens supporting it. This is the lowest level of support in 12 years since the downfall of former president Slobodan Milosevic.

“People are more sceptical than the politicians,” analyst Srdjan Bogosavljevic told IPS. “If one could tell them in 2000 that EU membership means salvation for the economy, they know it’s not the case now.”

 Analyst Djordje Vukadinovic says Serbs are looking closely at nearby Greece, where half a million among a Serbian population of seven million spend their summers.

“Irresponsible politicians presented the EU, in the past, as the beacon of development,” Vukadinovic told IPS. “Since Greece has fallen into debt, and news on brutal bailout methods has been all over the media, scepticism is normal. The main question is – what is the price ordinary people have to pay.”

Economist say the candidate status brings Serbia closer to the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) funds that could bring 200 million euros (265 million dollars) in investment.

“Forty million euros (53 million dollars) are ready to be invested into agriculture from 2014,” agriculture minister Dusan Petrovic told journalists. “It does not seem so much now, but bearing in mind that agriculture is the most successful production activity, this means a real boost.”

Agriculture is the only profitable export, earning 2.4 billion dollars in 2011. The growth rate in agriculture has been between 18 and 27 percent over the past decade.

The biggest opponents of EU membership are hard-line nationalists who want to keep traditional values and the Serb identity alive. For them, steps that bring Serbia closer to the EU mean loss of national identity and submission to the West.

Vojislav Kostunica, leader of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), and prime minister for 2004-2008 has said this is not a moment for celebration. “Who can celebrate the candidacy now?” he said in a statement. “People who have no jobs, who have become very poor…Status represents an empty word with the high price paid.”

Kostunica was referring to Serbia’s agreement last week that Kosovo, its breakaway province, could have full representation in international meetings, despite the fact that Serbia opposes the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008.

“In order to get the candidate status, we had – de facto and de jure – to recognise the independence of Kosovo,” deputy leader of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party Dragan Todorovic said in a statement. “Stories of economic prosperity with the EU membership candidacy are just empty talk.”

Belgrade University professor Zarko Korac believes “there is little will for change.”

“There was and there remains in Serbia the constant battle between the conservatives that don’t want to change anything, and progressives who want improvement and change,” Korac told IPS. “This is the case now, again. The bad thing is that the former are very strong, like the Serbian Orthodox Church, for example.”

“Things will change (with the candidacy), of course,” Korac added, “But not as much, as fast, as many would like.” (END/IPS/EU/IP/UE/VZ/SS/12)

For the first time in its history, Serbia has bought back a company sold to a foreign investor almost ten years ago, for the symbolic price of a single dollar. But while the purchase has stirred a sense of national pride, it is hardly a success story for the Balkan economy; rather, it has exposed the failure of a decade-long effort to privatise the national economy.

Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic signed the resale deal on Feb. 1 with representatives of U.S. Steel, the first private enterprise to enter the country after the downfall of former leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Back in 2003, U.S. Steel bought up the bankrupt Sartid steel mill in the eastern town of Smederevo for 33 million dollars.

Six months ago, the company announced it was leaving Smederevo due to years of underperformance. The plant had been operating well under its annual capacity of 2.4 million tonnes since 2007 and, together with its sister factory in Slovakia, made a loss of 65.5 million dollars in the first three quarters of 2011.

The Serbian Government has been consistently down-playing the negative effects of the embarrassing situation by promising to keep all 5,500 mill workers at their jobs.

“We’ll find the money either by borrowing from banks or redistributing budget allocations,” Cvetkovic vowed, while admitting that the annual cost of keeping the mill running could reach 100 million dollars, a bill the struggling economy can ill afford to pay.

Critics say the sale was a desperate move ahead of the May 2012 general elections that the regime hopes to win, but do not believe the government has the capacity to save the dying mill nor the workers who depend on it for a livelihood.

On the verge of recession?

Perhaps the only positive outcome of the steel mill purchase is that it has shone a harsh light on the last 12 years of privatisation in Serbia, which began in earnest after Milosevic was forced to quit office back in 2000 and have resulted in some 20 billion dollars worth of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country.

Privatisation has been described by each successive government since 2000 as Serbia’s “only option” for economic recovery, but recent studies and analyses prove that it has devastating results that often lead to recession and possibly even the collapse of national economies.

“Some 3,000 firms were privatised since 2001,” Danijela Rajkovic of the Social-Economic Council of Serbia, an entity comprised of experts from the labour ministry and representatives from all major trade unions in the country including Nezavisnost (Independence) and the Union of Autonomous Syndicates of Serbia (SSSS), told IPS.

However, she said that the Privatisation Agency has annulled roughly 600 contracts so far, due to a range of “irregularities”, including certain companies defaulting on payments, and both foreign and Serbian buyers going bankrupt as a result of poor sales or underproduction.

She told IPS that nations in ‘transition’ (political or economic) were responsible for between 10-15 percent of annulled privatisation contracts worldwide.

“Serbia stands at the top with an average of 20 percent; in the industrial sector, almost a third (of the contracts) were annulled,” Rajkovic said.

According to the Council’s study on the impacts of privatisation in Serbia – the only comprehensive report compiled on the subject – more than 500,000 people have been left jobless since 2000, impacting over a million of these workers’ dependants.

This is particularly significant for a nation whose total labour force is just 3.2 million people and where the unemployment rate stands at a staggering 23.7 percent.

Svetlana Mancic an official of the SSSS, told IPS that only a third of the surviving private firms – just 800 in total – are economically active today, while “only 20 percent of them pay regular salaries to their employees.”

Experts agree that hastily implemented and unregulated privatisation is only partially responsible for Serbia’s current unemployment epidemic.

Serbia’s trade relations with economies hamstrung by ripple effects of the 2008 global economic downturn has placed additional strain on the developing country.

Some 500,000 people lost their jobs in the 2008-2011 period, due to global economic contraction.

“The aim of transition was not only the sale of companies to private owners,” economic analyst Misa Brkic told IPS. “There was also the need for a new economic climate and the development of industrial policies to support certain areas of production.”

Sadly, that did not happen. Instead, Serbia has experienced a slowing down of its economic partnerships with Greece and Italy and is now on the brink of recession itself, he said, adding that growth forecasts for Serbia have fallen from 1.5 to 0.5 percent this year.

Brkic, along with many other experts, believes that Serbia might face recession as early as June of this year.

He stressed that negative growth of gross domestic product (GDP) for two quarters in a row would bode very badly for the country.

For the first time in Serbian history the issue of abused and incarcerated women is nudging its way into public consciousness. Credit: Ranmali Bandarage/IPS

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jan 31 2012 (IPS)

The women languishing in Serbia’s Pozarevac Penal Correctional Institution are victims twice over: survivors of decades of domestic violence, they have been imprisoned for killing their partners and often spend up to 15 years in jail.

In a rare example of successful cooperation between non-governmental organisations and the Serbian government, a major effort is currently underway to shed light on this unusual phenomenon and for the first time in Serbian history the issue of abused and incarcerated women is nudging its way into public consciousness.

“There was a general (plan) for improving conditions for women in prison but when we realised that one in 10 of the imprisoned were sentenced for killing their partners after years of family violence, we (decided on) broader action that includes support, education and inclusion programmes once they return to society,” Vesna Nikolic Ristanovic, director at the victimology society of Serbia (SVD), told IPS.

“The women live with the combined traumatic experiences of (domestic) violence and their crime, carry the stigma once they return to society and face the possibility of either becoming victims or perpetrators again,” she added.

Statistics from the SVD track the annual rise of reported family violence, which was 30 percent in 2010 and rose another 30 percent in 2011.

A recent survey conducted by the SVD found that over half the women in Serbia experienced some form of family violence last year, while intimate partner violence resulted in the deaths of 44 women during that same time period.

In 2011 16 women – most of them in their 60s and 70s – who had suffered decades of domestic violence were convicted for killing their partners and sent to Pozarevac.

The only facility of its kind for women in Serbia, Pozarevac is named after the town in which it was built in 1874, some 120 kilometres east of Belgrade. It currently houses 769 inmates.

“From Prison to Life without Violence” – a two-year-long joint project undertaken by SVD, the office of the ombudsman, the state secretariat for labour and social policy in charge of gender equality and combating domestic violence and Pozarevac prison administration – has been underway for a year now.

The project aims to educate the judiciary on the impacts of domestic violence and the specific violent responses of abused women, says Milos Jankovic, deputy ombudsman in charge of protecting the rights of imprisoned individuals.

“Punitive policy was practically the only area in which men and women were equal in Serbia,” Jankovic told IPS.

“Women were sentenced to equally grave prison sentences as men, up to 15 years or more in very serious murder cases, regardless of the torture that led women to commit the crime in the first place,” he added.

However, judicial reforms in the past few years and a harsh spotlight on family violence have led to the first ‘lenient’ sentence (of two and half years) for a woman who killed her violent partner. The crime was categorised as ‘manslaughter in an affected state’, where the accused is ruled to have been in a diminished or uncontrollable state of mind at the time of the killing.

For people like Jankovic, who deal with these issues on an almost daily basis, this lenient sentence was a long awaited victory.

The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia has undertaken a campaign encouraging judges to give more weight to past abuse as a mitigating factor in pronouncing prison sentences.

It has also launched an action, backed by Serbia’s most prominent female politicians and activists, to help convicts seek pardon or early release.

Serbia is still a traditional, patriarchal society where events that unfold behind closed doors are expected to remain there; family secrets dragged out into the open often spell shame for the families involved.

But the nationally recognised campaign has sparked off a wave of newfound boldness, with scores of women coming forward to tell their stories.

More than 6,500 cases of domestic violence were reported between January and November of 2011.

“The rise of reported cases does not necessary indicate more abuse, but rather a growing awareness amoung people,” said Jasmina Nikolic of SVD’s victims’ office.

“Increased encouragement (from the government and NGOs) to report abuse and ask for protection has added to this,” she told IPS.

Anka Gogic Mitic, a warden at Pozarevac, said that the women serving sentences for murder or other crimes against violent partners come “from all social structures, education levels and financial situations.”

“We try to work on building their capacity and preparing them for social inclusion once they leave,” Gogic Mitic told IPS.

The effort not only provides professional training in bakery, dressmaking or catering but also involves a group of four psychologists and therapists who help women talk through the violence most of them have endured since childhood.

Many live in denial of the grave crime they committed or else are ashamed to face their grown children and families, Gogic Mitic said.

“The issues these women face can only be described as sensitive and complex; no case looks like the other, except on the surface. The hope we have is not to see them at the facility again in the future and we put all our effort into that goal,” she added.

According to an old Serbian fairy tale, God tells a poor man who enters a gold mine that no matter what he chooses to do inside, he’ll be sorry when he leaves. If he takes some gold, he’ll be sorry for not taking more; if he doesn’t, he’ll be sorry for not taking any at all.

Modern Serbia now finds itself in a similar situation to the hero of that ancient tale.

Experts have revealed that parts of South-eastern Serbia lie on two billion tons of oil shale that could be processed into oil worth roughly 60 billion dollars in the next decade.

Further, the introduction and implementation of sufficient technology to turn the crude into derivates could reap between 120 and 180 billion dollars, according to studies by several domestic and international mining institutes and the Serbian ministry of environment and mining, which kept this secret carefully guarded until early January.

“It is our goal to introduce the most modern international technology so that oil shale can become a resource that will significantly improve the energetic balance of Serbia,” Oliver Dulic, minister of environment and mining, said last week on a visit to the small town of Aleksinac, some 210 kilometres south-east of the capital.

Yearning for growth

For the last few years, Serbia has barely managed to stay afloat in the tides of the global economic downturn, paying the price for moderate economic improvement with high unemployment and modest salaries.

The country’s unemployment rate soared to 23.7 percent in November 2011, up from just 19 percent in 2010. This is the highest level of unemployment since former dictator Slobodan Milosevic was ousted more than a decade ago, the national statistics bureau said Monday.

A breakdown of the data revealed the youth population to suffer the most, with an unemployment rate of 51.9 percent for the 15-24 age group and 32.0 percent for those between the ages of 25 and 34. But the discovery of shale deposits promises a leg-up for the struggling economy. Dulic proclaimed, “Several thousand people will be employed” once the operation is put into motion with the investment of between 700 and 800 million dollars.

In fact, Dulic’s visit to Aleksinac last week came after the media had a field day with the discovery of oil shale in the small, poor town, which is now gaining recognition as the frontier of what many hope will be a richer Serbia, once oil money starts to flow into state and municipal coffers.

The dirty side of progress

The celebration of imminent wealth notwithstanding, numerous experts have warned the “oil fairy tale” has a dark side that ordinary people are completely unaware of, namely, that the method of shale extraction is “the dirtiest technology” in the world today, with irreversibly destructive environmental impacts.

A long and bloody history has left the bulk of the Serbian public either apathetic or unaware of environmental issues: the wars of the 1990s that tore apart former Yugoslavia, followed by 10 years of economic sanctions, coupled with the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 have all but decimated the economy and created an economically overburdened citizenry.

In fact, the Serbian media has paid little attention to the controversy surrounding oil shale exploitation or to the growing international call against it.

But there is no escaping the fact that the proposed extraction project will be hazardous to the environment.

Oil shale is the term used for sedimentary rock that contains solid bituminous materials called kerogen, which are released as petroleum-like liquids when the rock is heated either underground (in situ) or in complexes above the ground, in the chemical process of pyrolysis.

The process gives off a vapour, which, when cooled, turns into liquid shale oil, or unconventional oil, which is then processed into oil and used for a host of economic activities.

According to Dejan Skala, a professor at the technology faculty in Belgrade, “Environmental problems (resulting from shale extraction) are enormous, particularly in the case of underground exploitation, as underground waters are heavily contaminated.”

He added that surface (or ex citu) exploitation, which is practically open pit mining, is also highly problematic, as it requires rock to be heated at incredibly high temperatures in special facilities, leaving the surrounding area looking much like Moon landscape.

Often, soil becomes too contaminated to host vegetation and the entire diverse ecosystem of the locality is destroyed.

The massive amounts of water consumed by the processing plants require the construction of protected deposition pools. The facilities also generate large quantities of carbon dioxide, which contribute significantly to global warming.

“Such processes should not be undertaken (in or) near densely populated areas,” Skala stressed.

According to Zoran Majdin, one of the few Serbian journalists dealing with environmental issues, “oil shale mining calls for serious environmental concern due to the (careless) use of land and water, (insufficient) waste disposal and waste water management, green house gas emissions and air pollution that people are completely unaware of.”

“So far people [are only concerned with the] economic progress associated with oil extraction,” he added.

Residents of Aleksinac are particularly thrilled about the project and conversations about oil shale have begun to dominate daily life in the small town.

“It’s high time someone did something for this part of Serbia,” Vladan Milosavljevic (60), one of the 5,000 miners employed in the Aleksinac coal mines – the biggest employer of the town’s 17,000 people until the disaster in 1989 – told IPS.

“Since (the mine was shut down) we’ve seen only poverty and bare survival here but the story of oil shale brings new hope,” he said.

Asked about the environmental hazards, Milosavljevic expressed little concern. “We survived the NATO bombing (in 1999),” he told IPS, “we can survive many other things as well.”

By - - and Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Dec 30 2011 (IPS)

Serbia saw the first rehabilitation of a member of its royal family earlier this month, in a move by the supreme court described by historians as “deeply moral” and necessary – for generations who remember the Karadjordjevics as well as those who have learned about them from the history books.

The 15-page long court ruling says prince-regent Paul Karadjordjevic (1893-1976) will no longer be considered a war criminal – the conviction pronounced against him by the Communist regime that took over in 1945 at the end of World War II.

The ruling also says that rehabilitation means restoration of property to the prince’s heirs, seized by the Communists 66 years ago.

“The prince’s criminal conviction was of a political and ideological nature,” historian Branka Prpa told IPS in an interview. “His rehabilitation is a matter of reviewing historical biases. History did happen, we have the precise facts, and we have to look at them again. What we had as a ruling against him since 1945 was a selective approach to history and a falsification of facts,” she added.

Prince Paul was a member of the Karadjordjevic family that ruled what used to be the kingdom of Yugoslavia between the two world wars. He was the prince-regent after the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934 in France, as Alexander’s son Peter was a minor.

History books, after the Communists took power, said that Paul’s foreign policy immediately before WWII was pro-German and “contributed to the Axis powers’ war of aggression.” The prince was accused of signing a cooperation treaty with the Axis powers – Germany, Italy and Japan – and was dubbed a “traitor to the nation”.

However, historical documents and international archives available for the past two decades revealed that it was not the prince who signed the treaty, but two top Yugoslav politicians at the time, and that the prince believed in vain that the treaty could keep Yugoslavia out of the war. Instead, the Germans overran the country and the Karadjordjevic family fled abroad.

The Communist uprising freed the nation and banned the royals from returning, labelling them as traitors. All their property was confiscated. But the Yugoslav federation fell apart in 1991 during a bloody war.

“The court ruling on rehabilitation tells us some other things we still have to learn about and deal with,” Prpa said. “The Prince was pronounced a criminal and traitor at a time of (Communist) political monopoly without proper procedure, by a hastily convened Commission…Tens of thousands of people met the same fate and it’s time to see justice done for many of them. It’s never too late, as so many families have suffered the consequences.”

For historian Predrag Markovic, the rehabilitation of Prince Paul represents an effort by modern Serbian society to overcome the ideological divisions imposed by the Communists who ruled the country from 1945 to 2000.

“It was the long imposed division that said ‘Communists were patriots’ as they were victorious in WWII, while ‘all the others were traitors’,” Markovic told IPS. According to him, the prince was a pragmatic yet naïve politician “who believed in negotiations and tried to avoid the war.”

In the opinion of both Prpa and Markovic, the first rehabilitation of any of the Karadjordjevics does not mean monarchy could be restored in Serbia, the part of the former Yugoslavia that the royal family came from.

“It’s a moral act of satisfaction for the family,” Prpa said, while for Markovic it is not yet clear “what the broader public thinks about the issue.” No in-depth survey has been conducted in Serbia about the restoration of royalty.

Over the past decade, several members of the Karadjordjevic family have returned to Serbia, following the downfall of the Communist regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

A grandson and namesake of assassinated King Alexander lives in the White Palace in Belgrade, since a special decree was issued by the first post-Milosevic government. He is involved in charitable and humanitarian activities.

The daughter of Prince Paul, Princess Elizabeth, lives in Belgrade as well. She initiated the procedure for rehabilitation of her father before the supreme court. In one of her many interviews in the Serbian media, the princess said she was glad that her father’s name “was finally cleared…That is the most important thing I ever wanted,” she said.

One of the possibilities for the princess now is to regain her property rights and claim some houses and a castle her father had in Slovenia. As for a large collection of classical and particularly modern paintings by prominent impressionists, owned by her father until 1945 and currently in the National Museum of Serbia, she said their place is “in the museum.”

So far, none of the Karadjordjevics have any political ambitions, unlike their relative in neighbouring Bulgaria, Simeon II. The heir to the Bulgarian throne created a political party upon his return to the country after the fall of Communism in 1989, and won the elections in 2001. As prime minister, he and his National Movement Simeon II (NMSII) ruled the country for four years, until 2005.

The Karadjordjevics will most likely follow in the footsteps of another relative, King Michael of Romania, who was also allowed to return to his country after the fall of Communism. He splits his time between Romania and Switzerland, and never took up the revival of monarchy as his cause.

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic and - -
BELGRADE, Dec 14 2011 (IPS)

On Dec. 1, the government in Moscow turned down a petition for Russian statehood by some 22,000 Kosovo Serbs who argue that their lives as ethnic minorities in Kosovo have become “unbearable”.

Serbs in Kosovo see the rejection of their appeal, filed on behalf of their next of kin, as yet another blow from a country that is often portrayed in the media as an “ally” or “big brother” but is yet to express any fraternity with the 100,000-strong minority in Kosovo.

Officials in Moscow claim that granting blanket citizenship is “impossible” due to the strict regulations of the Russian constitution.

“Russian laws do not allow for (such moves) but we will find other ways to support the suppressed minority,” foreign ministry spokesperson Aleksandr Lukashevich said in Moscow on Dec. 1.

He said Russia understood that Kosovo Serbs “face constant repression at home” and assured the public that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently agreed to boost “other forms” of support such as humanitarian aid.

Still, Moscow’s message came as a huge blow to Kosovo Serbs.

Zlatibor Djordjevic, head of the association Stara Srbija (Old Serbia), which initiated the citizenship petition, told Belgrade’s national TV station that petitioners had been expecting “a lex specialis (special law) to be introduced by relevant bodies” to solve the question of citizenship.

“It is easy for Islamic nationalists (Albanians) to attack Kosovo Serbs with total impunity but people might think twice before attacking a Russian citizen,” he added.

Of the more than 1,000 Serbs killed in Kosovo since 1999, either in their homes in the middle of the night or in fields while cultivating their land, only a handful has been granted posthumous justice through the U.N. or the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), both of which have been slow to deal with the violence.

Several of the most gruesome cases, such as the murders of 14 Serbian harvesters in 1999 or the bus explosion that killed 12 Serbs in 2003, were eventually brought to justice but alleged perpetrators were quickly set free due to “lack of evidence.”

In March 2004, unrest by organised groups of thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo left 19 Serbs dead, 4,000 displaced, 935 Serb houses burned and 35 Orthodox churches destroyed.

Most of these atrocities have thus far been chalked up to “retributive justice”, meted out by ethnic Albanians who were themselves slaughtered in the thousands by Serbian armed forces in the late 90s.

Understanding the bid for statehood

Kosovo carries with it a long history of conflict between Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanian Kosovars, with each group placing religious and cultural significance on the land.

In the early 1990s, Muslim Albanians seeking independence from former Yugoslavia took up arms against the dictator Slobodan Milošević but were crushed in a brutal military offensive led by Serbian forces that left over 10,000 ethnic Albanians dead.

In an effort to stem the bloodshed and send a message to Belgrade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) carried out a series of air raids on former Yugoslavia between March and June of 1999.

By mid-June 1999, the Serbian military and police had withdrawn from Kosovo, leaving the U.N. to administer the region until the majority ethnic Albanians unilaterally declared independence in 2008.

The Christian Orthodox Serbs who remained in the Northern regions that border Serbia now live in geographical proximity but in cultural and political alienation to the ethnic Muslim majority.

So far, 85 of the 193 U.N. member states have recognised Kosovo’s self-declared independence but Serbia has staunchly vowed never to do so. Caught in the middle of this political wrangling, Kosovo Serbs have sworn to recognise the authority of Belgrade over and above the laws of Pristina, Kosovo’s administrative capital.

Lingering hostility

Meanwhile, the lines of land and history that were blurred by bloodshed during the Kosovo Wars remain sites of fierce struggle, making Kosovo Serbs’ bid for statehood a pressing one today.

Pristina’s efforts to exert police control over the mostly Serb inhabited North Kosovo earlier this year led to a wave of violence against the Kosovo Force (KFOR), a NATO-led international peacekeeping force tasked with establishing peace and security.

Expressing their loyalty to Belgrade and their desire to remain physically connected to Serbia proper, local Kosovo Serbs have mounted physical barricades preventing ethnic Albanian and international control of the Serbian border.

According to Serbian Government spokesman Milivoje Mihajlovic, the request for Russian citizenship puts unnecessary “political pressure” on Moscow, since Belgrade is doing everything in its power to safeguard the rights of Kosovo Serbs.

But others are much more sympathetic to the petition.

Nebojsa Popovic, a top official of the nationalist Democratic Party of Serbia, told IPS, “The call (for citizenship) spoke with a voice of desperation and fear.”

“It was a call not only to Russia, but also to Serbia and the international community. Others are deciding the fate of Serbs in Kosovo without their participation or voices,” Popovic added.

“It is obvious that Kosovo Serbs do not trust anyone any more,” historian Predrag Popovic told IPS. “They have lost faith in Belgrade, EULEX and the remnants of the U.N. administration. They want concrete political aid in a situation where they have been forsaken by all.”

“They believe Russia alone can provide their safety and security,” he added.

Nebojsa Covic, former head of the coordinating body of the government of Serbia for Kosovo, said this latest turn of event was a “reminder to the international community that Serbs are now the ones being oppressed in Kosovo, facing uncertainty and grave violations of their human rights by the ethnic majority.”

Though it failed in its original mission, the petition to Moscow has sparked some unexpected reactions.

NATO’s Russian representative Dmitry Rogozin told Belgrade media last month that “Kosovo Serbs should be offered (relocation) to areas east of the Urals and fill the demographic hole in Russia”, since that region is currently experiencing negative birth rates.

According to Rogozin, Kosovo Serbs would easily adapt to their new surroundings and have no trouble finding sufficient employment.

However, a chorus of Serbian historians criticised the idea, harking back to 1752 when over 2,000 Serb families fled what used to be the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and settled in an area known then as Nova Srbija (New Serbia) and Slavenosrbija (Slav Serbia) and known now as the Ukraine.

In less than 100 years, these families became completely assimilated and absorbed by the local population, an outcome that is anathema to Kosovo Serbs who are desperate to preserve their ethno- religious roots.

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic and - -
BELGRADE, Nov 29 2011 (IPS)

Mevludin Jasarevic (23) is in police custody in Sarajevo, scarcely revealing how he came to the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina and went on a shooting spree in front of the United States embassy last month.

His lawyer Senad Dupovac says Jasarevic wanted to be killed and be proclaimed “a shaheed (martyr), who died honourably in the fight for Islam.”

But he was shot in the knee by a police sharpshooter in the incident Oct. 28, arrested, treated in a hospital and taken to prison. A Bosnian policemen suffered minor injuries through one of 105 bullets fired from Jasarevic’s automatic rifle.

Sarajevo prosecutor Dubravko Campara told local media that Jasarevic had said “the only court he recognised was the court of Allah. His statements were confused, but he mentioned Afghanistan and help to Muslims worldwide.”

Media in Bosnia and neighbouring Serbia were feeding the public with amateur videos taken of the incident. Experts warned that what was being described as “a terrorist act” by Bosniak authorities should be taken seriously, because Jasarevic belonged to the radical Wahhabi group within Islam that has taken roots in the Balkans.

“It’s still a problem to speak about Wahhabis in Bosnia,” Belgrade oriental studies professor Darko Tanaskovic told IPS. “This (the Sarajevo incident) might be a tip of the iceberg for things that are wrong in a society; the movement also represents a security and political problem in Bosnia.”

Bosnian security services put the number of Wahhabis in the country around 3,000 now, most of them living in remote central areas near the towns Tuzla and Zenica. They live according to Sharia law, and send their children to separate schools. The women are covered from head to toe.

They are remnants of thousands of mujahideen who came during the 1992-95 war to help Bosniak Muslims against Serbs. They were veterans from different war zones such as Algeria, Afghanistan, or the Caucasus. Most left when the war ended, but many stayed, married local women and took Bosnian citizenship.

Wahhabism is a conservative branch of Sunni Islam, rooted in Saudi Arabia and linked to religious militants in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia has a prominent stamp in Bosnia, it has invested more than 600 million dollars in building more than 150 mosques. The focal point of Saudi activity is the King Fahd Mosque in Sarajevo built at a cost of 30 million dollars.

Sarajevo academic Muhamed Filipovic told daily “Dnevni Avaz” in an interview that the responsibility for importing radical Islam lies with “those who wanted to claim sympathies in order to get financial aid; on the other hand, there were people who wanted the war in Bosnia not to be the war for the country, but for Islam.

“So much evil, hatred and separation has arisen in this country, which provided a fertile ground for the evil activities of people who stand against peace, negotiation, joint life and creation of a world of tolerance.”

More than 100,000 people were killed in the three years of war, most of them Bosniak Muslims. The internationally sponsored Dayton Agreement that brought peace to Bosnia did little for reconciliation among Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. They remain deeply divided, living in two separate entities of Bosnia-Herzegovina the Republic of Srpska for the Serbs and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

Bosnian terrorism expert Vlado Azinovic told Belgrade media that the “dysfunctional” state of Bosnia does not have enough capacity to deal decisively with militant groups. “If you talk to law enforcement officials, they would tell you that they could deal with this problem decisively if there was political will, but unfortunately we have not seen that political will for way too long,” Azinovic said.

Zoran Dragisic, a security expert in Belgrade, tells IPS there should be a clear boundary between “the legitimate right to express one’s religious beliefs and the political manipulation of individuals. This time it was the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo, but it could be anywhere else, including Belgrade.”

Bosko Jaksic, a Serbian journalist with extensive Middle East experience says “things should be carefully watched after Sarajevo. The list of targets may expand; extreme Wahhabis have aims to establish bases and to last.”

In recent years there have been warnings that some areas in the Balkans serve as training ground for a “white al-Qaeda” whose members are believed to blend in more easily in Western countries.

Mevludin Jasarevic came from the southern Serbian region Sanjak, shared by Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro. The area has been populated by Muslims since the days of the Ottoman Empire.

Its largest town is Novi Pazar in Serbia, where Jasarevic lived. He was arrested there last year for wielding a large knife during a visit by the U.S. ambassador and other ambassadors.

Serbian police claimed they found and broke up a group of Wahhabi extremists in a deep forest near Novi Pazar in 2007. Fifteen of them were given prison sentences ranging from several months to 13 years. Large numbers of their supporters are believed to have fled since then to Bosnia or Kosovo.

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic and - -
BELGRADE, Nov 4 2011 (IPS)

The path of reconciliation in former Yugoslavia has taken a musical turn, as the philharmonic orchestras of Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade team up for their first joint season since 1991.

Credit: Astroturfer/CC BY 2.0

Since Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro were all born out of this bloodshed, their process of reconciliation has been slow. Animosities and hatred run deep, particularly between Croats and Serbs.

To promote cooperation and better communication between the new nations, the national directors of three Balkan philharmonics have organised a programme of five performances that will rotate through the capitals of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia.

They chose to name the programme ‘Pika, Tocka, Tacka’ – the Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian words for ‘dot’ or ‘full stop’ – to symbolise an end to animosities in the region.

“The national orchestras are confident that they can cooperate despite our history of conflict and believe that this cooperation depends on the people,” Ivan Tasovac, director of the Belgrade Philharmonic told IPS.

“Changes cannot be dictated from the top and smart politicians have recognised this message,” he added.

The programme began to drum up support two months ago, following a concert by the Belgrade ensemble in the Croatian coastal town of Dubrovnik for the first time in 20 years, Tasovac told IPS.

In 1991-1992 Dubrovnik was heavily bombarded by the Serbian army and forced to live under siege for six months.

Thus the Belgrade Philharmonic’s classical music performance, directed by the internationally renowned conductor Zubin Mehta, was first met by a wave of Croatian nationalist protest.

However, the situation calmed when Croatian media welcomed the performance with an article by the prominent music critic Branimir Pofuk entitled, ‘Why I’m not afraid of Serbian violins.’

Pofuk told IPS that ‘Pika, Tocka, Tacka’ represents “yet more proof that musicians are re-building old and making new bridges and that politicians can only follow.”

For his colleague Denis Derk, the joint programme marks, without any doubt, “putting an end to mutual skirmishes and prejudices” that still exist in the region, which was torn by wars two decades ago. “It (the cooperation) opens new doors for new cultural cooperation in this part of Europe, and the beginning was marked with maestro Mehta’s support at the Dubrovnik concert.”

Prior to that concert, Mehta told reporters that “friendship and building of bridges” was the goal of Belgrade Philharmonic’s performance in Dubrovnik. “The concert represents much more for me than simply music,” he added, expressing support to the joint ‘Pika Tocka Tacka’ project as a step in the right direction. “To prove this, we’ll leave our hearts at the stage in Dubrovnik.”

“The ‘Pika, Tocka, Tacka’ programme proves that art has the power to unite people; the players and audience become one family,” Tasovac said.

“Besides this, all three national philharmonics share the same history of being held hostage to politically motivated funding,” he said, adding that each government has been reluctant to invest in fine arts, while simultaneously allocating large sums of money to pop music festivals or Balkans brass band competitions.

To combat this problem of underfunding, the Belgrade Philharmonic launched an unusual appeal to the public a few years ago, drawing attention to the state’s negligence in financing the arts.

In a self-parodying newspaper advertisement, it called on music lovers to show financial support by promising that an “85-year-old orchestra with a rich repertoire will play at your house for a reasonable fee. We can be booked for weddings, funerals, baptisms and birthdays – we have appropriate attire for all occasions.”

The ad succeeding in securing more funding from the state, as well as drawing immense support from the Zubin Mehta Belgrade Philharmonic Foundation, which solicited donations from a variety of large international and Serbian companies, and contributions from private individuals.

The Belgrade Philharmonic also stunned the public with its ‘New Years’ cycle, a performance series that celebrates the Jewish, Islamic, Gregorian and Julian calendars as well as the Chinese New Year, with concerts taking place a day before each holiday featuring music from local and international composers and conductors.

Belgrade-based leaders of Jewish, Islamic, Catholic and Orthodox communities all attend the concerts, which have drawn huge audiences since the beginning of 2010.

“We created this concert cycle out of respect for all the multicultural, multi-ethnic countries in the world,” Tasovac said. “The more people learn about each other, the fewer misunderstandings there are in the world. Though we are a small and (financially) deprived ensemble, we have created something big and we have big ambitions.”

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Oct 19 2011 (IPS)

Dismayed by the lack of beer and chips at a football game three years ago, Dragan Stancic and Uros Petrovic, two young Belgradians, hatched a plan to take matters into their own hands.

A few weeks later, armed with 4,000 euros worth of start-up credit from the Serbian government’s self- employment programme, the unique “Errand Boys” delivery service was born, the first of its kind in a city where the only deliveries had hitherto come from fast food restaurants.

From a humble venture involving just two second-hand cars and two owner-employees, the service has grown to encompass over 40 employees, a call centre and 20 delivery cars, bikes and motorcycles that zip through the streets of Belgrade.

“Errand Boys” delivers everything from newly purchased washing machines to clothes, from groceries to medicines for the elderly. Delivery charges start at a reasonable rate and are proportionate to the value or size of the goods being transported.

Serbia barely survived the global economic crisis in 2008 and has not yet fully recovered. The country has an eligible workforce of 2.9 million people, of which 743,000 are unemployed.

At a time of such crippling economic uncertainty, Stancic and Petrovic represent just two of the 1,500 people in Belgrade who created their own employment schemes last year.

According to data from the National Employment Service these 1,500 entrepreneurs have provided employment opportunities to a further 5,000 people.

“Self-employment is one of the most reliable roads to economic sustainability,” economic analyst Misa Brkic told IPS.

“People here were used to the state providing them with jobs, but times have changed; our transition into a market economy over the past years has resulted in growing unemployment.

“But people who started thinking for themselves found ways to overcome this,” he added.

Fifty-four year old Vladan Milovic from the central Serbian town of Kragujevac is one such success story.

After labouring for 25 years in a car factory, he was made redundant in 2007. Rather than accepting his ‘redundancy’, Milovic simply sculpted another life for himself, one in which his livelihood was in his own hands.

“I put all my savings into angling equipment such as fishing lures, soft plastic baits and artificial flies,” he told IPS.

Milovic has turned one of the bedrooms in his apartment into a small factory stocked with equipment that he and his wife procured by travelling to neighbouring Croatia and Montenegro.

“I have an order for 10,000 floats now and I’m considering renting extra space, as our home has been turned upside-down (by the business),” he added.

After four years of self-employment, Milovic believes he is successful.

“Four years ago it looked as though everything had ended for us, but now we cover all our expenses and pay for our son’s studies in (the central Serbian town) Cacak,” he said.

Economist Marko Zdravkovic told IPS, “There is plenty of space for self-employment as well as a growing market demand for pharmacists, IT technicians, construction engineers etc.

“It would be easier for these professionals to start up their own businesses than to work in firms for fixed salaries,” he added.

Sasa Drndarevic, a mechanical engineer, gave up his fixed salary in Belgrade in order to start a private business in his native town of Uzice, 186 kilometres south of the capital.

Four years ago Drndarevic began restoring his grandparents’ abandoned estate in the tiny village of Zlakusi. The two old houses, built in 1907 and 1925, have now become part of an ‘ethno village’ – a tourist attraction that has flourished in Serbia over the past several years.

Apart from hosting city dwellers in the summertime, ethno villages offer a glimpse into Serbian life that existed decades, or even centuries, ago. These ‘villages’ are particularly popular among expatriates living in Belgrade, providing a welcome escape from the busy metropolis.

“Some 6,000 people have visited our ethno village in the past three years,” Drndarevic said.

“Apart from our people (Serbs), who are (charmed) by the antique household items, traditional architecture and old garden styles, we have also had visitors from Australia, Mexico and other far away nations.”

Drndarevic and his wife currently employ about 20 people from the village to provide services to the business venture.

“As for income, I can neither brag nor complain; but this is certainly better than waiting for one’s check each month and never having time for anything else in the smog-filled city,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Sep 27 2011 (IPS)

The Serbian parliament has adopted one of the most long awaited – and most controversial – laws in its recent history: the law on restitution of property confiscated by the communist regime after World War II.

The legislation passed on Monday stipulates the return of property or land when possible, or else compensation in state bonds from the 2.69 billion dollar fund set up by the state for some 150,000 former owners and their heirs in this east European nation of 7.5 million people.

The legislation is one of the pre-conditions for Serbia’s bid for European Union membership later this year.

It defines Mar. 9, 1945 as the date when brutal confiscation of private property and businesses began in Serbia, together with Feb. 15, 1968, when a second wave of confiscation was launched.

The law calls on former owners or, in many cases, their heirs, to submit property restitution claims to the newly formed Restitution Agency, until the end of 2013.

In 2014, it says, restitution of farmland, houses, apartments and forests will begin “where possible”. If not, state bonds will be issued to former owners or heirs as compensation, up to a maximum value of 672,000 dollars. “This is not an ideal law, but it is realistic and in accordance with Serbia’s economic possibilities,” Vice Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic told reporters at parliament after the legislation was passed.

“We had three things in mind when proposing the law: undo the injustice to many families; avoid causing additional injustice, by respecting the property rights of current owners; and bring the law into line with the property and financial resources at the disposal of our state, so that it could be applicable and would not endanger the financial stability of Serbia,” he added.

Djelic was responding to criticism of the law, mainly from the associations that group former owners of confiscated property. For years they had demanded complete restitution of land, real estate, factories, and hotel buildings – in some cases entire downtown areas of small Serbian towns, or public buildings and palaces in Belgrade, which belonged to their families up to 1945.

However, the law clearly says that what became state property and remained for public use – such as libraries, ministries, embassies, and health, cultural or educational institutions – will continue to be public property and will be compensated in bonds.

The former owners of factories that had been seized by the state but were privatised in the past two decades will be similarly compensated.

“The state has allocated six percent of GDP for restitution – 2.69 billion dollars,” Professor Zlatko Stefanovic, a financial expert, told IPS. “Anything more than that would misbalance the budget and undermine the sustainability of public finances.”

Other experts put their estimates of restitution and compensation at up to five billion dollars, “which is hardly something Serbia can meet,” as law professor Jovica Trklja commented to IPS.

“The whole process (of restitution) will thus be very slow and risky…the hasty way the law was pushed through only serves the EU candidacy bid and will remain a hot potato for the next government,” he added.

Serbia is to hold parliamentary elections in April 2012.

As for the decades it took to resolve the issue, Stefanovic notes that it took 20 years for post-WWII Germany to complete the process of de-nationalisation, while “Slovenia, the only EU member from former Yugoslavia, has been doing it since 1991 and hasn’t finished yet, and the same goes for Croatia and some other East European nations. There is no way the process will be quick here.”

Bogdan Veljkovic, an octogenarian U.S. citizen of Serbian origin, says that “former owners will get only the crumbs of what our families used to have.”

Before WWII, his family owned a bank, the biggest Serbian brewery, several hotels in downtown Belgrade, the first private art museum and several villas in the posh neighbourhoods of the capital, as well as several huge vineyards in central Serbia.

“I will not accept the limited financial compensation,” Veljkovic says. “My family and families of other shareholders in our enterprises want to revive the businesses. We’ll see who we shall address, even internationally, to have the injustice to us undone.”

For others, mostly farmers whose farmland over 20 hectares left for private purposes was confiscated for state-run farming enterprises, the law is not that bad.

“We have documents on what vineyards and forests belonged to us before 1945, the mills, saw mills and small brick factory,” farmer Dragan Stepanovic, 38, from the village of Bratinac, told IPS. “I’m glad our family will get them back…Yes, the state has employed people at the mills until now, and I’ll keep them on. To be honest – there was investment of money and work in them in the past years and I respect that as well.”

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By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Aug 14 2011 (IPS)

A new literary trend is gaining momentum in Serbia. It revolves around a phenomenon sociologists are describing as “prison literature”.

Dozens of books have appeared in the past couple of years authored by several notorious inmates of international and local prisons. The writers include those sentenced for war crimes in the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia, and for the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, but also those sentenced for smuggling drugs.

The common denominator for all is an effort to “tell the truth”, Milan Lukic, one of the most controversial authors, wrote in his book ‘Tale of the Hague Detainee’.

Lukic, 41-years-old, was sentenced to life in prison by the United Nations, Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2009. Lukic was convicted of playing a role in the abductions and executions of dozens of Muslims in eastern Bosnia, and the burning alive of 120 Muslim civilians in two houses in his native Visegrad in 1992.

The release of Lukic’s book, Aug. 4, caused broad public outrage among human rights activists, civil society organisations, and Muslim survivors in Bosnia for two reasons.

First, Lukic claims to be innocent and writes that he was not present in Bosnia at the times of the crimes he was sentenced for – he denies that any such crimes happened there at all. Second, the book was launched at the parish house of the biggest Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sava in Belgrade – without any opposition from the influential clergy there. The church remains silent about the event, and attempts to obtain its reaction by IPS remained unanswered.

“This is an outrageous event, an insult to victims,” Bakira Hasecic told IPS over the phone from Sarajevo. Hasecic is a native of Visegrad and heads the association Women Victims of War, whose members include survivors of gang rapes perpetrated by Serbs in eastern Bosnia. “I’d love to see if he listed all the people he burned to death in Visegrad, as he listed the men who ‘defended’ the town from Muslims; he raped me there and many other women and girls.”

For the Humanitarian Law Fund, publication of such book also represents “an offence for victims,” its expert Aleksandar Obradovic, told IPS. “Courts have established what happened in Bosnia, but this is a scandalous event as it adds to distortion of views of the broader public.”

Obradovic was referring to the fact that Serbs are still deeply divided about the war in Bosnia, as many believe it was waged for protection of Serbs against aggressive Bosniak Muslims who allegedly aimed to exterminate them.

Another inmate – who wrote 10 books in prison – is Milorad Ulemek ‘Legija’, 46-years-old, who was sentenced to 40 years for the assassination of the first democratic prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, in 2003.

Ulemek’s latest book ‘Through Water and Fire’ was released recently. Well known for his paramilitary engagement in wars in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia, Ulemek writes about the unique bravery of Serb units in those wars.

The sentence against him reads that the assassination of Djindjic had the aim of, among other things, overturning the constitutional order of Serbian state.

Lawyer for the Djindjic family, Rajko Danilovic, told IPS that it’s high time the state “which said what it thinks about Ulemek by sentencing him to 40 years did something about his efforts to gain popularity in this way.”

Sources at the Serbian Prosecutorial Office say that “only if the books contain calls for overthrowing the constitutional order, some action can follow,” but experts disagree.

“There are ways to prevent denials of war crimes or further infliction of pain for families of victims, because these book have such an effect,” Dragoljub Todorovic, a Belgrade lawyer told IPS. “We can turn and look around, see how these things were done elsewhere – like the ban on denial of the holocaust… Otherwise, the books look like a slap in the face to all.”

Serbian prosecutors are more interested now to establish who helped another author publish his works while he was a fugitive from justice. Radovan Karadzic, 66-years-old, the wartime political leader of Bosnian Serbs, published three books while running from justice during the period from 1998 until his arrest in 2008. The books do not deal with war, but are a novel, a collection of poetry, and fairy tales.

“That would lead to uncovering his ring of support,” sources from prosecution say.

‘Prison literature’ also includes work by well-known ordinary criminals, such as Kristijan Golubovic, 42- years-old. Golubovic has spent the better part of the last decade in Greek and Serbian prisons due to drug smuggling convictions.

Golubovic wrote an autobiography ‘I’ about his “adventurous life”, as he described it, and is preparing a new volume to be released soon.

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By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jun 24 2011 (IPS)

For decades, the former Yugoslavia was a communist country with a human face, whose nations enjoyed high standards of living compared to other Eastern Europeans, visa-free travel abroad, and participatory government. Twenty years ago, on Jun. 25, all that ended.

It ended for a country where private property was allowed, be it homes or small business. Education and healthcare were free, jobs were secure, and Yugoslavia had a firm reputation as one of the leaders of the non-aligned movement.

On Jun. 25, 1991, the most developed republics of Croatia and Slovenia made unilateral declarations of independence. They saw the Serbian leader at the time, Slobodan Milosevic, as the incarnation of evil who wanted their nations to remain under what they saw as the iron rule of Belgrade in a world that had changed after the fall of Berlin wall in 1989.

Milosevic was acting as the protector of all Serbs, who lived outside present day Serbia in hundreds of thousands in Croatia and Bosnia. He publicly declared “the need for all Serbs to live in one country.”

“Those two things set the stage for the wars of the 90s,” historian Predrag Markovic tells IPS. “After the human loss of some 150,000 people and enormous economic losses, it is hard to say what the benefit of independence was for some 24 million people who lived in former Yugoslavia. Yes, they are proud of having their own countries, but the essential substance of serious states is lacking in almost all when compared to former federation.”

Slovenia with a population of two million, Croatia with 4.6 million, Bosnia-Herzegovina 4.2 million, Serbia 7.5 million, Montenegro 650,000 and Macedonia with two million people are quite different places now. The three leaders that led nations in wars of the 90s, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic and Milosevic are all dead.

The most developed Slovenia is so far the only member of the European Union (EU), since 2004. Croatia stands next in line for membership in 2013. Montenegro and Macedonia are candidates; Serbia awaits its status by the end of the year, while Bosnia-Herzegovina is unable to recover from the 1992-95 wars.

“The EU was our only and natural choice,” Slovenian economist Joze Mencinger tells IPS. “But we have a tiny say in the EU, smaller than ever in former Yugoslavia.”

Apart from human losses and direct war damages in the 1991-95 period, sociologist Milan Nikolic singles out “the collapse of values such as empathy, solidarity, intolerance of crime – organised or other etc…But the world has also changed so much since 1991. We all have to look into future.”

Of the many devastating effects of the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, the economic crisis is striking. The debt crisis is hitting all former Yugoslav nations hard due to the economic consequences of the war (particularly in Bosnia), as production is low, imports are high and transition into a market economy has taken its toll in a massive loss of jobs. A lack of substantial foreign investments since the global economic crisis is also hitting hard.

Unemployment in Slovenia is the lowest – around 10 percent. It reaches a staggering 40 percent in Bosnia.

The foreign debt of the six new nations is 171 billion dollars, compared to former Yugoslavia’s debt of 24 billion dollars. Macedonia has the lowest, 2.5 billion dollars, and Croatia the highest, 64 billion dollars.

Production level (except in Slovenia) has not reached the level of 1989, the best year prior to wars. All former Yugoslav statisticians use that as a benchmark.

“Had we not fought in wars, Yugoslavia would have been in the EU long ago and the development level could have been at least double compared to 1989,” Nikolic says.

But for many people, such ideas mean little. Many young people are almost unaware there was a Yugoslavia once, as history books differ and give only a superficial overview of the past.

“I don’t know what Dubrovnik is,” 22-year-old Bojan Stancic from Kraljevo in Serbia tells IPS, when asked about the most prominent tourist spot on the Croatian Adriatic coast. “It’s Croatia? Well, that’s a foreign country I plan to visit one day.”

Many older people still have connections that date to the days of former Yugoslavia.

“I have family in Belgrade and we go to visit,” says Dara Buncic (65), a pensioner from Zagreb in Croatia. “It still has the outlines of the capital of a big country. We are all small now (new nations) but I tell friends to go and see it (Belgrade)…it’s part of our common history no matter how proud we are being independent Croatia.”

“Until 20 years ago, I spent two months each year on Croatian coast since the age of two,” says Belgradian Sasa Jaksic (55). “We had family there. So, in the 35 years of former Yugoslavia I can say I spent a total of almost six years living in Croatia. No one can take that from me, or the memories of good times we had in former Yugoslavia.”

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