Balkanalysis.com

By Christopher Deliso Despite several recent reports suggesting that radical Islam in Kosovo no longer represents a significant security threat, the beating of a prominent Albanian imam by Drenica-area Wahhabi Muslims indicates that the challenge within the Muslim community – the real target of the foreign-funded extremists – persists. The disproportional yet unexplained influence of [...]

By David Binder* Talk of a “Greater” this or that Balkan nation-state has subsided in recent years as the region experienced the creation of ever more mini-republics – a total of eight on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The trend toward fragmentation was initiated by petty nationalists and fostered by the United States and [...]

By Christopher Deliso When Kosovo’s Albanians celebrated the major Muslim holiday of Bajram, at the end of September, more than a few worshipers were conspicuous for their absence. A trickle of media articles over the past few months have dealt with the issue of religion in Kosovo from a relatively unreported angle: the curious phenomenon [...]

By Christopher Deliso The tense ordeal of four Macedonian journalists detained by police in a northern Greek village on Monday is gaining wider attention, and has caused an international outcry against the perceived heavy-handedness of Greek authorities- and what their apparent contempt for the free press may be covering for. For their part, the Greeks [...]

By David Binder* Crucial decisions about Serbia’s territorial integrity and the direction of its foreign relations in the context of May 11 elections are reminders of the life and times of the prime minister and party leader Nikola Pasic (1845-1926). While one might rightly dwell on Pasic’s fundamental contributions to the development of parliamentary democracy, [...]

By Christopher Deliso “When they attack, what should I do first?” a young Serbian KPS police commander says. “Should I try to evacuate my children, or fight back? We are twenty, thirty thousand. They are two million.” The likelihood or not of such an imagined massive assault from Albanians doesn’t matter here in Mitrovica, the [...]

(Balkanalysis.com Research Service)- New information from regional intelligence sources, as well as open-source channels, indicates that cross-border militant activities on at least four fronts are among the new developments to watch in the aftermath of Kosovo’s independence declaration on February 17. While world attention has focused mainly on the political and legalistic dimensions of the [...]

By Nicky Gardner* When the celebrated English travel writer Edith Durham arrived at the monastery at Gracanica one hundred years ago, she came to a place that had virtually no experience of the twentieth century. It is an episode that Durham recalls in her book High Albania. The incumbents, evidently horribly worried by Durham‘s unmarried [...]

By Christopher Deliso When they report on Kosovo, foreign media bodies often reiterate that the province is the “spiritual cradle’ of Serbia- without going into much detail about what this means, or what it might entail for the situation there today. And so, while the press has devoted considerable attention to the implications of Kosovo’s [...]

By Nikolas Rajkovic* Three key words have animated the policy-speak on Kosovo to date: “negotiation’, “compromise’ and “solution.’ These terms seem uncontroversial in their literal sense and have been accepted by the parties and the “Troika’ powers (the US, EU and Russia) without dispute. As such, the verbal landscape has been marked by the strategic [...]