January 22, 2007
By Mehmet Kalyoncu The assassination of Hrant Dink, one of the most prominent Turkish Armenians and the editor-in-chief of bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos outside his newspaper’s office was a deplorable act by any definition. Yet it was not an unexpected one, given the selection of the target and its expected/actual impact on Turkish society [...]
January 3, 2007
By Lara Scarpitta* It is old news that geography matters in foreign policy. A dormant EC/EU had to learn this vital lesson in 1989, when communism crumbled behind its safe walls. Faced with the sudden prospect of bordering poor, unpredictable and unstable neighbours, it responded by anchoring the former soviet satellites of Central Europe with [...]
October 1, 2006
By Alisa Voznaya The tenets of Islamic radicalism, often associated with Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia, are slowly penetrating the previously secular populations in the Balkans and the North Caucasus. In Turkey, where 99 percent of the population identify themselves as Muslim, the unique sense of secularism is also beginning [...]
July 3, 2006
(Balkanalysis.com Research Service)- The phones were silent at the OSCE’s Skopje’s headquarters this afternoon as staff grappled with a new and unexpected problem: the sensational news that one of the mission’s own high officials, Georgian national Zurab Lomashvili, had been arrested for drug trafficking while abroad. Russia’s Interfax reported yesterday that the career diplomat and [...]
Balkanalysis on Amazon Kindle