June 30, 2004
Starting about a month ago, Balkanalysis.com has learned, residents of Macedonia have been unable to access an ever-increasing number of American websites. Certain commercially compiled reports commonly purchased by American ISPs and hosting companies are warning that the country is a hotbed of internet fraud- and so, these companies are starting to block access to [...]
June 28, 2004
Perhaps the planners of the Istanbul NATO Summit were just too busy setting out the cocktail napkins, or dealing with George W. Bush’s 600-strong entourage to take notice, but according to the alliance’s website, the late Boris Trajkovski is still the President of Macedonia, and Branko Crvenkovski remains Prime Minister. One imagines that it will [...]
June 28, 2004
Well, Europe can breathe easier tonight, knowing that a “pro-Western reformer” has won the presidency of Serbia, as opposed to a “hard-line nationalist.” So get out the party hats and wheel in the cake!Almost as farcical as the notion that the West actually cares about anything more than maintaining its own self-image of the dutiful [...]
June 25, 2004
Nebojsa Malic takes a hard look at the options on the eve of Serbia’s presidential election. After the first round of the pointless poll that was the Serbian presidential election, two candidates emerged to contest the dubious honor or presiding over Empire’s favorite European pariah. On one side is Boris Tadic, heir to Zoran Djindjic’s [...]
June 24, 2004
The most crucial, and therefore most unpleasant issue with which Macedonia has to grapple in 2004 is decentralization- the devolution of power from the central government to “local self-government” administrations throughout the countries. This issue has continued to be the point of greatest friction between the once-solid government coalition. But not only is it straining [...]
June 22, 2004
Macedonia, along with Albania and Croatia, have been told that they shouldn’t accept much from the alliance at its annual summit in Istanbul, to be held on June 28-29. While not entirely unexpected, the news is a bit dismaying for a government that has been optimistically selling its citizens on a 2006 guaranteed entry into [...]
June 20, 2004
Fretting over Serbia’s political future has been an obligatory part of the Western discourse as shaped by the media, government officials, NGOs and policy centers, ever since Slobodan Milosevic was deposed in October of 2000. Almost four years later, many of the same characters who supplanted him remain in the game, chief of all Prime [...]
June 18, 2004
As if organized crime wasn’t already pervasive enough in the Balkans, we now have the news that Colombian drug lords have established a beachhead in the region for their exports to Eastern European mafias. Channel News Asia today quoted executive director of UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Antonio Maria Costa, who said that [...]
June 16, 2004
Bulgaria’s completion of membership negotiations with the European Union on Tuesday has paved the way for its entrance into the EU on January 1, 2007. Having jumped this hurdle, there remains only the EU Accession Treaty (to be signed next spring) as the last major bureaucratic formality for Sofia’s joining up with the Western club. [...]
