March 25, 2009
While considerable foreign support remains for Macedonia and its leadership, the tenor and tone of recent foreign media reports reveal possible trouble ahead. By Christopher Deliso* After a snowy weekend in which first-round presidential and local voting unfolded peacefully and without major reported incidents of fraud, Macedonians are feeling relief that they seem to have [...]
February 25, 2009
By Dr. Darragh Farrell* By the beginning of next month it should be known who the next High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) will be. It is probably safe to assume that the next High Representative will also be the last, despite the fact that the previous two holders of the post, Christian Schwarz-Schilling [...]
February 21, 2009
By Anahit Shirinyan* On February 4, 2009, the presidents of the seven member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, signed an agreement in Moscow during a session of the Collective Security Council to set up a rapid response force. In the past the CSTO had [...]
January 16, 2009
On Monday, 19 January, a NATO general will be dispatched to Skopje from the Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, Italy, to look into complaints made against a military official currently employed in a senior position in the alliance’s Macedonia liaison office. It is likely that this visit will result in an important personnel change [...]
December 14, 2008
Professor Victor Friedman is one of the world’s foremost experts on Balkan languages, and has been studying them for almost four decades, since 1993 as a linguist at the University of Chicago. Professor Friedman has a special place in his heart for Macedonia, which he first visited in 1971. This year finds him back in [...]
November 9, 2008
By Scott Taylor for Balkanalysis.com* Editor’s note: Two former British military officers working as OSCE observers during the August conflict in South Ossetia have recently spoken out in The Times of London, condemning Georgia, and not Russia, for the commencement of hostilities then. Their verdict harmonizes with the following special briefing for Balkanalysis.com, written by [...]
October 12, 2008
By Ioannis Michaletos Energy issues related to the rapid increase of Russia’s prominence on the global political stage, greatly assisted through the country’s use of its energy riches, have captured considerable attention from world policymakers. Russian is the major supplier of natural gas to Europe, providing an estimated 50 percent of gas consumed in the [...]
July 24, 2008
The dramatic arrest of former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, hiding as a bushy-bearded spiritual guru in Novi Beograd, will no doubt inspire a Hollywood film in the not-too-distant future. And it has already inspired a lot of pathos and hyperbole, with one foot similarly in the door of fiction (Madeleine Albright accusing Karadzic of [...]
April 13, 2008
By Christopher Deliso* It’s a clear warm spring day high on a barren, charred plateau in Macedonia, and Mike Goldstein is holding a Hebrew prayer book in his hands, with a row of tiny saplings decorating the freshly-turned earth at his feet. A retired general in the Vermont National Guard, Mike has been asked by [...]
April 12, 2008
By David Binder* Serbia is both blessed and cursed. So, too, are those blessed and cursed that are forced by geography or other circumstance to deal with Serbia. They usually become entrapped. The reason is obvious. As defined in the last century by Jovan Cvijic, the preeminent Serbian geographer of the Balkans, “We built our [...]
