Balkan Insight

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network published a major report on post-conflict justice in the former Yugoslavia, highlighting regional challenges in dealing with issues like war crimes prosecutions, missing persons and victims’ participation in judicial processes.

The search for the remaining missing persons from the wars in the former Yugoslavia is still being hindered by politics, a BIRN conference on regional cooperation and post-conflict justice was told.

The Pentagon is planning to spend $162.5 million on weapons, ammunition and other equipment in 2019 to arm Syrian forces fighting Islamic State, ISIS, a recently released budget report reveals.

The US-based watchdog Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report, published on Tuesday, marked Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania as only "partly free", while some countries, like Serbia, experienced a downward trend.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network has published an e-book about the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, aiming to increase understanding about the newly-established court that will try ex-guerrillas for crimes during and after the war.

At the biennial meeting of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network on Saturday, Ana Petruseva, director of BIRN Macedonia, said the situation facing the media in the Balkans "seems to be going from bad to worse".

The EU’s annual Terrorism Situation and Trend Report, released June 15, says terrorists are still joining the conflict in Syria from the Balkans, which remains a route to and from the conflict zones in the Middle East.

More than 800 foreign terrorist fighters have travelled to Syria to join the armed conflict there from the Western Balkans, it says.

Russians See Serbia, Bulgaria Among Closest Friends from BIRN on Vimeo.

The nostalgia for socialist Yugoslavia in some Balkan countries indicates dissatisfaction with present-day conditions, a historian who led research on the issue told BIRN.

The following story about the Syrians of Bulgaria appears after the author was awarded funding as part of the BIRN Summer School for Investigative Reporting.

Depleted, Divided and Dispirited - The Syrians of Bulgaria originally appeared on Balkan Insight.

Novinite is republishing the text without abridgment.