More and more media in the Balkan region are being acquired and controlled by big tycoons. For journalists and industry experts, this trend is heavily reflected in editorial policies, creating growing problems of censorship and self-censorship
Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said on Sunday that police arrested 77 people after violence erupted in the wake of a mass protest in central Belgrade – while officials warned that further arrests could be imminent.
Dacic told media that “criminal charges will be filed against 35, and a request to initiate misdemeanour proceedings will be filed against 26 persons”.
The bodies of the dead men, women and children, including a baby aged seven months, from the Kosovo town of Suva Reka were buried in pits in an army base in Prizren before being secretly transported to a new mass grave in the police compound at Batajnica, near Belgrade.
While the existence of the mass grave at Batajnica was uncovered in the spring of 2001, after the fall of the Milosevic regime, those responsible for the murders and the transportation have never been brought to justice – owing largely to police obstruction.
Women in Bulgaria are paying a higher price for the failings of the country’s healthcare system, which is increasingly dependent on older, poorly-paid female nurses and midwives.
Fifty-five years old, a nurse in Sofia laments that she does not have many younger colleagues. After all, younger nurses might cope more easily with the workload.
“I became unbearable, obsessed with odds, results and adrenaline,” said Mak, a 31-year old from Banja Luka in Bosnia, whose name has been changed to protect his identity.
It remains to be seen whether Serbia will keep its word and no longer indirectly arm Ukraine.
Serbia surprised some observers after its President and Prime Minister assured Russia that it’ll no longer indirectly arm Ukraine, which came after Russia’s Foreign Spy Service (SVR) said that Serbia hasn’t discontinued this trade that it first raised awareness about in late May. Serbia’s latest smooth-talking towards Russia is politically self-serving, however, since it preceded last weekend’s attempt to revive the protest movement which Moscow consistently assessed to be a Western-backed Color Revolution.
Concern is growing over a cyber-security software deal between the Republika Srpska entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina and China’s ELINC, owned by a conglomerate sanctioned by the United States over alleged ties to China’s ‘military-industrial complex’.
In Sarajevo’s old town, local guides find navigating the dense network of old streets a lot easier than charting a path through an even denser tangle of overlapping laws.
While Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, was still waking up, a group of tourists from Hong Kong disembarked from their bus near the iconic City Hall.
A draft statute obtained by BIRN suggests Kosovo’s president will press ahead with a ‘presidential’ commission on Kosovo’s 1998-99 war, ignoring experts who say it risks being seen as ‘highly political’.
Kosovo’s president is poised to launch a ‘transitional justice’ commission with a three-year mandate and the possibility of survivors addressing public hearings, according a draft statute seen by BIRN, the terms of which risk fuelling concern about the initiative’s independence and fairness.
When a US lawyer, Martin De Luca, visited Bosnia’s Serb-led entity, Republika Srpska, in April, the entity’s publicly-funded media outlets reported that he was a member of a US administration team investigating the alleged misspending spending of funds by aid agency USAID in Bosnia and Herzegovina.