By Emina Ćerimović
NEW YORK, Feb 27 2017 (IPS)

The day I met Julija she was playing cheerfully with her baby sister on the floor inside their room in Kragujevac, a small town in southern Serbia. When she saw me – a stranger — on the doorstep, she smiled widely and stretched out her hands, offering a hug. As I held her, I could hear how difficult it was for her to breathe. I looked at her, she smiled and touched my face with her hands and only then did I see that Julija’s fingers were webbed.

Julija was born with Apert Syndrome, a rare genetic condition. Children with this syndrome have fused skull bones, resulting in distorted facial features, vision and hearing loss, trouble with breathing and eating, and learning difficulties. In Julija’s case her fingers and toes were not separated either, which made holding a spoon or picking things up difficult.

Her parents – Jasmina and Ivica – told me about their struggle to provide Julija with the health care she needed to stay alive and to develop. For three months following Julija’s birth in 2012, her parents used every penny they had to ferry their daughter across the country in search of specialists who could help. The repeated advice they received was not helpful: Place your child in an institution. It’s best for you and her. “One doctor even told us that it will be a torment for us to keep her with us and that we might not get anything back in return,” Jasmina told me. “As if my child was a burden for me. None of these doctors were thinking about what is best for the child.”

Emina Ćerimović. Photo Courtesy of HRW

By the time she was barely older than 3 months, Julija had undergone surgery twice on her head and had spent a month in intensive care with pneumonia. Because of her severe breathing problems and her need for frequent specialist treatment that Julija could not receive in her hometown, her parents decided, with heavy hearts, to place her in an institution for children with disabilities in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, where she would have access to emergency care.

However, after only two days, her parents noticed a drastic change in Julija’s spirit. “She was no longer the child she used to be,” Jasmina told me.

After Julija spent 10 months in the institution with only short visits home, Jasmina and Ivica decided to bring her  back home. “When Julija is at home with us, she is one child, and when she is in an institution, she is a different child,” Jasmina said. “She has made much more progress [at home], in terms of her weight and everything else. Her intellectual development, too.”

With Julija back home, her parents worked tirelessly to find help. Ultimately, a relative in Australia made contact with a specialist at the Australian Craniofacial Unit in Adelaide. Supported by private fund raising efforts and the unit itself, in 2015, Juljia underwent life-changing surgery to reshape her skull to make more room for her brain.

When I met Julija in November 2015, surrounded by her loving parents, toys, and a baby sister, she was thriving and happy. Her parents told me she had put on weight and learned to sit, which she was unable to do when her parents brought her back from the institution. A few months after my visit she learned to walk  on her own. In November 2016, her fingers were unwebbed in a hospital in Belgrade.

A child’s ability to access health care needed for survival and development should not have to depend on their parent’s ability to fight for it. Every child has a right to health and health services.
However, Julija’s journey has only just begun. She will need professional support to learn to use her fingers. Her teeth are not growing properly. She still needs another facial and skull operation. She understands everything, her parents told me, but she doesn’t speak yet. And her breathing and her eyes have to be managed constantly.

Julija was not the only child I met in Serbia who was struggling to get much-needed health care. Hundreds of children with developmental disabilities, the majority of whom have a living parent,  are placed in large residential institutions where  they are separated from their families.  Unlike Julija, they don’t have someone who is working tirelessly to ensure their lives are the very best they can be. Instead, they are often neglected because there is not enough staff, and in some cases confined to beds for their entire lives, without any stimulation. Long-term placement of children in institutions leads to  stunted physical, intellectual, emotional, and social development.

A child’s ability to access health care needed for survival and development should not have to depend on their parent’s ability to fight for it. Every child has a right to health and health services.

On February 28, more than 80 countries worldwide are marking the tenth international Rare Disease Day, including Serbia. The Serbian government – and every government around the world– should mark this day by committing to provide all children with disabilities access to the health care they need to stay alive and to grow and develop just like other children. Julija – who was deemed a hopeless case at birth – just celebrated her fifth birthday with family and friends.

Excerpt:

The recent destruction of this 2,000-year-old temple – the temple of Baal-Shamin in Palmyra, Syria – is yet another grim example of how the armed group calling itself the Islamic State (IS) uses conventional weapons to further its agenda – but what has fuelled the growing IS firepower? Photo credit: Bernard Gagnon/CC BY-SA 3.0

By Marek Marczynski
CANCUN, Mexico, Aug 27 2015 (IPS)

The recent explosions that apparently destroyed a 2,000-year-old temple in the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria were yet another grim example of how the armed group calling itself the Islamic State (IS) uses conventional weapons to further its agenda.

But what has fuelled the growing IS firepower? The answer lies in recent history – arms flows to the Middle East dating back as far as the 1970s have played a role.

Marek Marczynski

After taking control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June 2014, IS fighters paraded a windfall of mainly U.S.-manufactured weapons and military vehicles which had been sold or given to the Iraqi armed forces.

At the end of last year, Conflict Armament Research published an analysis of ammunition used by IS in northern Iraq and Syria. The 1,730 cartridges surveyed had been manufactured in 21 different countries, with more than 80 percent from China, the former Soviet Union, the United States, Russia and Serbia.

More recent research commissioned by Amnesty International also found that while IS has some ammunition produced as recently as 2014, a large percentage of the arms they are using are Soviet/Warsaw Pact-era small arms and light weapons, armoured vehicles and artillery dating back to the 1970s and 80s.

Scenarios like these give military strategists and foreign policy buffs sleepless nights. But for many civilians in war-ravaged Iraq and Syria, they are part of a real-life nightmare. These arms, now captured by or illicitly traded to IS and other armed groups, have facilitated summary killings, enforced disappearances, rape and torture, and other serious human rights abuses amid a conflict that has forced millions to become internally displaced or to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.“It is a damning indictment of the poorly regulated global arms trade that weapons and munitions licensed by governments for export can so easily fall into the hands of human rights abusers … But world leaders have yet to learn their lesson”

It is a damning indictment of the poorly regulated global arms trade that weapons and munitions licensed by governments for export can so easily fall into the hands of human rights abusers.

What is even worse is that this is a case of history repeating itself. But world leaders have yet to learn their lesson.

For many, the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq drove home the dangers of an international arms trade lacking in adequate checks and balances.

When the dust settled after the conflict that ensued when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s powerful armed forces invaded neighbouring Kuwait, it was revealed that his country was awash with arms supplied by all five Permanent Members of the U.N. Security Council.

Perversely, several of them had also armed Iran in the previous decade, fuelling an eight-year war with Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

Now, the same states are once more pouring weapons into the region, often with wholly inadequate protections against diversion and illicit traffic.

This week, those states are among more than 100 countries represented in Cancún, Mexico, for the first Conference of States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which entered into force last December. This Aug. 24-27 meeting is crucial because it is due to lay down firm rules and procedures for the treaty’s implementation.

The participation of civil society in this and future ATT conferences is important to prevent potentially life-threatening decisions to take place out of the public sight. Transparency of the ATT reporting process, among other measures, will need to be front and centre, as it will certainly mean the difference between having meaningful checks and balances that can end up saving lives or a weakened treaty that gathers dust as states carry on business as usual in the massive conventional arms trade.

A trade shrouded in secrecy and worth tens of billions of dollars, it claims upwards of half a million lives and countless injuries every year, while putting millions more at risk of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious human rights violations.

The ATT includes a number of robust rules to stop the flow of arms to countries when it is known they would be used for further atrocities. 

The treaty has swiftly won widespread support from the international community, including five of the top 10 arms exporters – France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

The United States, by far the largest arms producer and exporter, is among 58 additional countries that have signed but not yet ratified the treaty. However, other major arms producers like China, Canada and Russia have so far resisted signing or ratifying.

One of the ATT’s objectives is “to prevent and eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms and prevent their diversion”, so governments have a responsibility to take measures to prevent situations where their arms deals lead to human rights abuses.

Having rigorous controls in place will help ensure that states can no longer simply open the floodgates of arms into a country in conflict or whose government routinely uses arms to repress peoples’ human rights.

The more states get on board the treaty, and the more robust and transparent the checks and balances are, the more it will bring about change in the murky waters of the international arms trade. It will force governments to be more discerning about who they do business with.

The international community has so far failed the people of Syria and Iraq, but the ATT provides governments with a historic opportunity to take a critical step towards protecting civilians from such horrors in the future. They should grab this opportunity with both hands.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 4 2015 (IPS)

The ‘West’ is a concept that flourished during the Cold War. Then it was West against East in the form of the Soviet empire. The East was evil against which all democratic countries – read West – were called on to fight.

I recall meeting Elliot Abrams, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State during the Ronald Reagan administration, in 1982. He told me that at the point in history, the real West was the United States, with Europe a wavering ally, not really ready to go up to the point of entering into war with the  Soviet Union.

Roberto Savio

When I tried to explain to him that the East-West denomination dated back to Roman times, long before the United States even existed, he brushed this aside, saying that the contemporary concept was that of those standing against the Soviet Empire, and the United States was the only power willing to do so.

The Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington. The fact that United States had a manifest destiny and was therefore a spokesperson for humankind and the idea that God was American were the bases of his rhetoric.

In one famous declaration, he went so far as asserting that United States was the only democratic country in the world.

After the end of the Cold War, President George W. Bush took up the Reagan rhetoric again. He declared that he was president because of God, which justified his intervention in Iraq, albeit based on false data about weapons of mass destruction (Abrams was also by his side). Now it turns out that he has an indirect responsibility for the creation of the Islamic State (IS).“The [Ronald] Reagan presidency changed the course of history, because he was against multilateralism, the United Nations and anything that could oblige the United States to accept what was not primarily in the interests of Washington”

All this starts in Iraq.  The first governor at the end of the U.S. invasion was retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner who did not last very long because his ideas about how to reconstruct Iraq were considered too lenient. He was replaced by U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer.

Bremer took two fateful decisions: to eliminate the Iraqi army, and to purge all those who were members of the Baath party from the administration, because they were connected to Saddam Hussein. This left thousands of disgruntled officers and a very inefficient administration.

Now we have learned that the mind behind the creation of IS was a former Iraqi colonel from the secret services of the Iraqi Air Force, Samir Abed Al-Kliifawi. The details of how he planned the takeover over of a part of Iraq (and Syria), have been published by Der Spiegel, which came to have access to documents found after his death. They reveal an organisation which is externally fanatic but internally cold and calculating.

After the invasion of Iraq, he was imprisoned by the Americans, and there he connected with several other imprisoned Iraq officers, all of them Sunnis, and started planning the creation of the Islamic State, which now has a number of former Iraqi army officers in its ranks. Without Bremer’s fateful decision, Al-Kliifawi would probably have continued in the Iraqi army.

What we also have to remember here is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was rendered useless by the Cold War, and many saw its demise. However, it was given the war against Serbia as a new reason for existence, and the concept of the West, embodied in a military alliance, was kept alive.

According to a report by scholars with the ‘Costs of War’ project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, the terrible cost of the Iraqi invasion had been 2.2 trillion dollars by 2013, not to speak of 190,000 deaths. If we add Afghanistan, we reach the staggering amount of 4 trillion dollars – compared with the annual 6.4 trillion dollar total budget of all 28 members of the European Union – for “resolution” of the conflict.

One would have thought that after that experience, Europe would have desisted from invading Arab countries and aggravating its difficult internal financial balance sheet. Yet, Europe engaged in the destabilisation of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, leading to the explosion of Jihadists from there, 220,000 deaths and five million refugees.

In the case of Libya, under the prodding of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and the United Kingdom’s David Cameron, both for electoral reasons, Europe entered with the aim of eliminating Mu’ammar Gheddafi, then leaving  the country to its destiny. Now thousands of migrants are using Libya in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe and Cameron has decided to ignore any joint European action.

For some reason, Europe always follows United States, without further thinking. The case of Ukraine is the last of those bouts of somnambulism. It has invited Ukraine to join the European Union and NATO, prodding a paranoiac Putin (with the nearly unanimous support of his people), to act to finally stop the ongoing encirclement of the former Soviet republic.

The problem is that Europeans are largely ignorant of the Arab world. A few days ago, Italian police dismantled a Jihadist ring in Bergamo, a town in northern Italy, arresting among others an imam, or preacher, No Italian media took the pain to ascertain which version of Islam he was preaching. All spoke of an Islamic threat, with attacks being planned on the Vatican.

If they had looked with more care, they would have found out that he preached the Wahhabi version of Islam, which is the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia, and which consider all other Muslims as apostates and infidels. This is very similar to IS, which has adopted its Wahhabi version of Islam, but is a far cry from equating Wahhabism with terrorism – all terrorists may be Wahhabis but not all Wahhabis are terrorists.

Saudi Arabia has already spent 87 billion dollars in promoting Wahhabism, has paid for the creation of 1,500 mosques, all staffed with Wahhabi imams, and continues to spend around three billion dollars a year to finance Jihadist groups in Syria, along with the other Gulf countries. This has made Assad an obliged target for the West, and he has succeeded in his claim: better me than chaos, a chaos that he has been also fomenting.

Now the debate is what to do in Libya and NATO is considering several military options. The stroke of luck this time is that U.S. President Barack Obama does not want to intervene. However, with the 28 countries of the European Union increasingly reclaiming their national sovereignty and seldom agreeing on anything, a military intervention is still in the air.

Meanwhile, thousands of refugees try crossing the Mediterranean every day (with the known number of deaths standing at over 20,000 people) to reach Europe, thus strengthening support for Europe’s xenophobic parties which are exploiting popular fear and rejection.

It is a pity that, according to United Nations projections, Europe needs at least an additional 20 million people to continue to be competitive … but this is politically impossible. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 25 2015 (IPS)

The United Kingdom has been accused of “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis – and the accusation comes from no less than the House of Lords, not usually considered a place of critical analysis.

In a scathing report, the upper house of the U.K. parliament has said that the United Kingdom, like the rest of the European Union, has sleepwalked into a very complex problem without looking into the possible consequences, letting bureaucrats taking critical political decisions.

Roberto Savio

It said that it was only when the conflict was well entrenched that political leaders decided to negotiate the Minsk ceasefire agreement, reached by Angela Merkel of Germany, Francois Hollande of France, Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, with the notable absence of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.

In fact, it was left up to bureaucrats of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to take decisions regarding Ukraine, the same kind of bureaucrats as those appointed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission who, with their usual arrogance, decided the European bailout conceded to Greece where it is widely known that the priority was to refund European (especially German) banks.

The media have a great responsibility in this situation. In all latter day conflicts, from Kosovo to Libya, the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that. Let us be to the point and crisp.“The media have a great responsibility … the formula has been very simple. Let us divide conflicts into good and bad, let us repeat the declarations of the ‘good guys’ and demonise the ‘bad guys’. Let us not go into analytical disquisitions, complexities and side issues because readers do not like that”

The latest example. All media have been talking of the Iraqi army engaged in taking back the town of Kirkuk from the Caliphate, the Islamic State. But how many are also informing that two-thirds of the Iraqi army is actually made up of soldiers from Iran? And that the Americans engaged in overseeing this offensive are in fact accepting cooperation from Iran, formally an archenemy?

How many have been reporting that the ongoing negotiations over the nuclear capabilities of Iran are really based on the need to restore legitimacy to Iran, because it has become clear that without Iran there is no way to solve Arab conflicts? And how many have informed that all radical Muslims have received financial support from  Saudi  Arabia, which is intent on supporting Salafism, the Muslim school which is at the basis of al-Qaeda and now of the Islamic State?

Recent history shows the West has gone into a number of conflicts (Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012), without looking beyond the immediate consequences, and without any consideration for long-term analysis. The costs of those conflicts have always exceeded the benefits foreseen. An auditor company could not certify any of those conflicts in terms of costs and benefit.

Let us start from the collapse of Yugoslavia, and let us remind ourselves that the West has three principles of international law under which to shield itself as a result of its actions.

One is the principle of inviolability of state borders, which was not applied to Serbia, but is now the case for Ukraine. The second is the principle of self-determination of people, which was used in Kosovo for the Albanian minority living in that part of Serbia but it is not considered valid now for the Russian populations of East Ukraine. The third is the right to intervene for humanitarian interventions, which was used first in Libya, and is now under consideration for Syria.

The drama of the Balkan conflicts was due to a very unilateral action by Germany, which decided to extrapolate Croatia and Slovenia from the Yugoslav federation as its zone of economic interest. The then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, pushed this in an unprecedented way throughout the West.

It was the first time that Germany had play an assertive role, with U.S. support, and it was a Cold War reflex – let us eliminate the only country left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which still inspires itself to a socialist state and not to a market economy.

Serbia, which considered itself heir to the Kingdom of Serbia (out of which Josep Broz Tito had created the socialist Yugoslavia), intervened and a terrible conflict ensued, with civilians paying a dramatic cost.

That conflict renewed dormant ethnic and religious divisions, about which everybody knew, but Genscher, who was then no longer in the German government, explained at a meeting in which the author participated: “I never thought the Serbians would resist Europe.”

It is interesting to note in this context that just a few weeks ago, the International Court of Justice ruled that neither Serbia nor Croatia had engaged in a genocidal war. The news was reported by many media, but without a word of contextualisation.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been destroyed to implement the winning theory of “free market against socialism”. Did the creation of five mini-states improve the lives of the people? Not according to statistics, especially of youth unemployment, which was unknown in the days of Tito.

Then there was Iraq where, in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack in September 2001, the rationale for attacking the country was based on assertions that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was both harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda, the group held responsible for the attack, and possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to the United States and its allies. These, which turned out to be lies, were blindly propagated by the media

But if, as is widely believed, petroleum was the cause, let us look at figures as an accounting company would do. That war is estimated to have cost at least two trillion dollars, without considering human life and physical destruction.

Iraq’s annual petroleum output at full pre-war capacity was 3.7 million barrels per day. Now a part of that is under the control of the Islamic State and Kurds have taken more than one-third under their control. But even at the full production, it would have taken more than 20 years to recoup the costs of the war.

It is, to say the least, unlikely that the United States would have had all that time – and since the war, has spent more than a further trillion dollars just in occupation and military costs.

And what about Afghanistan where there is no petroleum? Two trillion dollars have also been spent there … and the aim of that war was just to capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden!

Among others, it was said that democracy would be brought to Afghanistan. Now, after more than 50.000 deaths, nobody speaks any longer of institutional building, and the United States and its allies are simply trying to extricate themselves from a country whose future is bleak.

Now, the question I want to raise here is the following: what has happened to looking beyond the immediate consequences and long-term analysis in foreign policy?

Is it possible that nobody in power questioned the wisdom of an intervention in Libya for example, even assuming that Muammar Gaddafi was a villain to remove?  Did any of them ask what would happen afterwards? Did any of those in power ask what it would mean to support a war to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and what would happen after?

It appears that the House of Lords is right, we are taken into conflict by sleepwalkers. The West is responsible either for creating countries which are not viable (Kosovo), or for disintegrating countries (Yugoslavia and now probably Iraq), or for opening up areas of instability (Libya, Syria).

Without mentioning Ukraine where intervention is aimed at pushing the country towards Europe and NATO, thus provoking the potential retaliation of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Those errors have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people and, altogether, cost at least seven trillion dollars. Who is going to wake the sleepwalkers up? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

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.

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.

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.”

From the video “One photo a day in the worst year of my life”. Credit: Courtesy of B92 Fund Serbia

By Claudia Ciobanu
BELGRADE, Apr 26 2013 (IPS)

Up to a quarter of women in Europe have experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives, according to the Council of Europe. But despite the widespread nature of the phenomenon, more often than not we ignore it. A short video launched last month in Serbia managed to break this silence.

At first glance, the clip is just another photo-a-day video popularised on YouTube: photos of a smiling young woman follow one another, offering glimpses of different hairstyles and makeup choices.

But after a while the time-lapse video breaks the pattern. The woman’s eyes start looking sad, scared, and her face is covered in increasingly severe bruises and cuts. In the last image, she holds up a sign that issues a desperate call for help.

Before anyone even knew who the woman was or whether the video was genuine or fiction, it became a hit in Serbia and abroad, reaching two million views in just a few days.

It turned out that the film was in fact part of a campaign by the B92 Fund, a foundation associated with the leading private TV channel in Serbia, to raise awareness about domestic violence in this southeast European country.

In Serbia, over 60 women died as a result of domestic violence between the start of 2012 and today, according to the Autonomous Women’s Centre in Belgrade. And women’s groups claim that every second woman has suffered from verbal or physical abuse at some point in time.

“It is important to talk about this problem so that our society on the whole comprehends that it is not normal to beat women, so that women themselves are encouraged to report violence,” explains Veran Matic, the president of the B92 Fund. “Solidarity, getting people to react, and exerting pressure on authorities to take action on domestic violence are also our goals.”

Matic’s foundation has built five shelters for battered women in six years of work on domestic violence, and plans to open two more this year.

Together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the B92 Fund also works on lobbying authorities to better implement legislation providing protection from perpetrators of violence and assistance for victims.

B92 tries to harness the popularity and resources of the television station to meet social needs that are not properly fulfilled by state authorities.

For Danijela Pesic from the Autonomous Women’s Centre, which has worked on violence against women for the past two decades, improving the enforcement of legislation already in place is the most important aspect, as it would offer systematic solutions for victims.

She said that shelters, while important, are merely a short-term emergency response.

The other key to combating domestic violence is changing the culture, says Pesic. “The main cause of domestic violence is patriarchal values,” she says. “It is not poverty, lack of education or alcoholism – we are seeing the same rates of abuse in villages and cities, and across educational and wealth levels.

“Men have to stop believing they can be violent, and for this to happen we need to change our perception of gender roles, starting as early as kindergarten.”

Despite noticing some positive changes in Serbia over the past few years – importantly, women are feeling increasingly empowered – Pesic fears that the lack of systematic state support for actors working in the area of domestic violence might jeopardise progress.

Financing is patchy, often coming in the shape of project-based donations from the West, which inevitably run out without being replaced. As a consequence, for example, call centres for victims are forced to close down after only a few years, just as women are starting to rely on them.

Serbia is not yet a member of the European Union. And as a Balkan country, it has a reputation of being prone to machismo.

Yet the approach to domestic violence in this country is not untypical of the situation across many European countries: optimal legislation is adopted to meet EU standards, but state authorities fail to implement it properly; financing for non-governmental groups working on domestic violence is insufficient; and patriarchal values persist.

A 2012 report by the Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) network shows that only a third of European countries meet Council of Europe recommendations when it comes to a national free of charge helpline for victims of domestic violence.

In terms of shelter availability, the situation is worse: only five of 46 countries studied offer the necessary number of places, with Central and Eastern European countries performing worse than their Western counterparts.

Many post-socialist countries have started taking measures for preventing domestic violence and assisting victims more intensively only over the past decade. In Estonia, for instance, all of the country’s ten shelters opened in the last five years, financed by a combination of governmental and non-profit sources.

But many women’s groups across the region express doubts over whether the centres and other forms of assistance for victims will be able to continue operating in the future. The already precarious sustainability of the financing is being put under severe strain by the economic crisis.

A 2010 report by Oxfam and the European Women’s Lobby, “Women’s Poverty and Social Exclusion in the European Union at a Time of Recession: An Invisible Crisis?”, quotes NGOs across Central and Eastern Europe declaring that an increasing number of women have been calling helplines and requesting access to shelters since the crisis began.

This information (not yet quantified at the European level) is in line with the general view that economic turmoil leads to an increase in frequency and intensity of domestic abuse.

The same groups are also reporting negative impacts of austerity measures implemented across Europe in response to the crisis: from the closing of shelters in Romania and complaints by Slovakian NGOs that they have been hurt by the withdrawal of foreign donors to Estonian groups arguing they cannot plan for the long term because of a lack of support from local authorities.

EU funds, primarily in the form of the Daphne Programme, which offers financing to many of the women’s rights initiatives across the region, are also under question. The EU’s seven-year budget is getting renewed at the moment and the austerity wave in Europe has already led to an announcement of a reduction of its overall size.

While the European Commission told IPS that it proposed that women’s rights and gender equality programmes receive a similar amount of funding as before (the intended amount is approximately 800 million euros for the next seven years), some fear the fund will be significantly trimmed during further negotiations.

“While the recession and austerity measures are having a detrimental effect on the prevalence of violence against women, they are also having a negative effect on women’s ability to escape the violence,” comments Pierrette Pape from the European Women’s Lobby.

“Women’s economic independence is undermined while public services face funding cuts and cannot therefore provide adequate quality services,” Pape adds. “NGO-led services to support women victims of violence are also threatened by the tendering and marketisation of services, which leaves behind and in isolation many women and girls affected by male violence.”

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)

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)

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)

The trial of General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief accused of orchestrating war crimes and a campaign of genocide, has begun at a special U.N. court at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia made their opening statements against Mladic on Wednesday almost a year after his arrest in Serbia and subsequent deportation after years on the run.

Mladic is accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including orchestrating the week-long massacre of over 7,000 Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica in 1995 during the Bosnian war.

Prosecutor Dermot Groome said the prosecution would present evidence showing “beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes”.

“The world watched in disbelief that in neighbourhoods and villages within Europe a genocide appeared to be in progress,” said Groome, describing the beginning of the war in 1992.

“By the time Mladic and his troops murdered thousands in Srebrenica … they were well-rehearsed in the craft of murder,” Groome told the court.

Older but defiant

Dressed in a dark grey suit and dark tie, Mladic, now 70, flashed a thumbs-up and clapped his hands as he entered the courtroom in The Hague.

In the packed public seating area, a mother of one of the Srebrenica victims whispered “vulture” several times as prosecutors opened their case.

Later, Mladic made eye contact with one of the Muslim women in the audience, running a hand across his throat, in a gesture that led Presiding judge Alphons Orie to hold a brief recess and order an end to “inappropriate interactions”.

“Ratko Mladic is clearly not the stocky, physically imposing, bullish man that we remember from images of the early ’90s,” Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips reported from The Hague.

Phillips added, however, that even with his age, the general remained as defiant as ever.

“You could really sense his contempt for this court, which he calls the ‘NATO’ court,” he said.

Axel Hagedorn, a lawyer for many of the mothers of those killed in Srebrenica, said that many of his clients had travelled to The Hague, where they were relieved to finally see Mladic stand trial.
“I think he looks much more healthy than last year, when he appeared, that is good for us, because we hope that he can survive this trial and face imprisonment,” he said.

The Mladic trial would also help build a separate case by the Srebrenica families against the United Nations, he said.

In April, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the U.N. could not be prosecuted in the Netherlands for failing to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, but the families’ lawyers plan to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

“This case is very linked to our case, on the failure of the United Nations to protect the people of Srebrenica,” Hagedorn said.

There are concerns that Mladic’s trial could be disrupted by the defendant’s poor health. He is believed to have suffered at least one stroke while in hiding and was admitted to hospital for pneumonia last October.

Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, died of a heart attack in detention in 2006 before a verdict in his trial could be reached.

‘Biggest butcher’

Outside, protesters held up placards including one that said “we want justice for the victims of Srebrenica”.

Mladic, who was arrested in a village in northern Serbia last May, is also charged over the 44-month siege of Sarajevo during which more than 10,000 people died.

Mladic has refused to enter a plea and rejected the charges against him as “monstrous” and “obnoxious” in a preliminary hearing last June. He says he was defending his country and his people as leader of the Bosnian Serb army. The court entered a “not guilty” plea on his behalf.

He is the last of the main protagonists involved in the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia to go on trial in front of the special court established by the United Nations to prosecute crimes committed during the conflicts.

“This is the biggest butcher of the Balkans and the world,” Munira Subasic, 65, told the AFP news agency. She lost 22 relatives to Bosnian Serb military forces when Srebrenica was overrun in July 1995.

“I’ll look into his eyes and ask him if he repents,” said Subasic, who said she would watch the trial’s opening from the public gallery at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The case has stirred up deep emotions in the Balkans and Wednesday’s proceedings were broadcast live on big screens in Sarajevo, where thousands died between 1992 and 1995.

“I hope that many of those who are disillusioned and believe that Mladic is a Serb hero will change their minds, and that the trial will demonstrate that he was just a criminal and a coward,” Fikret Grabovica, president of the association of parents and children killed in the siege of Sarajevo, said.

“Even if Mladic lives until the verdict, it will bring only mild satisfaction for the victims of Srebrenica and hundreds of other places in the Serb Republic,” Grabovica added, referring to the entity that rules Serb majority areas of Bosnia.

‘Not satisfied’

Since the end of the war, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been divided into a federation of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and the Serb Republic.

Mladic’s lawyers last week attempted to have the trial pushed back as the court pondered their request to have presiding judge Alphons Orie removed from the bench. They had argued that Orie would be biased against Mladic because he had already condemned several of his former subordinates.

But Theodor Meron, the president of the court, denied the request.

“I am not satisfied that Mladic has demonstrated that a reasonable observer … would reasonably apprehend bias. I accordingly find Mladic’s request for Judge Orie’s disqualification to be unmeritorious,” he said in a statement.

Mladic is being held in the same prison as his former political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was arrested in 2008 and is now about halfway through his trial on similar charges to Mladic.

Mladic’s lawyers on Monday night filed another request to have the trial adjourned for six months, saying they had not had enough time to prepare, due to “errors” by the prosecution in disclosing documents.

Groome said on Wednesday he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment”.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

(END)

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)