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By Christopher Deliso* Despite several recent reports suggesting that radical Islam in Kosovo no longer represents a significant security threat, the beating of a prominent Albanian imam by Drenica-area Wahhabi Muslims indicates that the challenge within the Muslim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 Oxford Business Group* A pay raise for teachers has become a key policy issue in the parliamentary election campaign, raising concerns about state spending at a time when many say Romania should be taking steps to adopt fiscally responsible measures to protect its economy from the global financial crisis. The Chamber of Deputies had [...]

By Christopher Deliso When Kosovo’s Albanians celebrated the major Muslim holiday of Bajram, at the end of September, more than a few worshippers 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 [...]

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 Kosovo Albanian government’s [...]

Balkanalysis.com would like to announce that nine months’ worth of archived articles, many previously unavailable on the website, have now been uploaded to our page at the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL.com). The articles in question number more than 50, and cover the months March-December 2006. They will be of interest to researchers [...]

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 [...]