Bosnia

Kapidani is cataloguing any documents that he can find about his ancestors. "We've collected documents and testimonies from the elders, aiming to reconstruct their trip by land and sea," Kapidani told BIRN.

Back in the 1870s, Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the most culturally diverse parts of the Balkans, was mired in a multisided conflict.

That year, President George W. Bush was running for re-election and opposed military intervention in Bosnia. His top foreign policy officials, including Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, were traditional "realists", concerned with America's national interests and opposed to interventions where those interests were not at stake.

The Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina has condemned the attacks on the vehicles of two journalists from Banja Luka, a day after they criticised a law that threatens freedom of speech.

The Bosnian Missing Persons Institute told BIRN on Friday that 13 Bosniaks who disappeared in the village of Kratine in the Vitez municipality on April 17, 1993 have now been identified.

Missing Persons Institute spokesperson Emza Fazlic said that of the 13 identified victims, six were minors when they died.

Momentum is growing for a crunch reform of Bosnia's broken electoral system, but how and at what cost?

The building of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, 15 November 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE/PATRICK SEEGER

While there have been plenty of well-thought-out elaborations about what a new constitution for Bosnia and Herzegovina might look like, the major stumbling block remains the lack of political will for change.

Even if this private firm was unrealistically low-balling the price of the equipment, it is clear that Hodzic's company was grossly over-charging.

This kind of profiteering is hardly novel in Bosnia. I have elsewhere described much of the region's political economy as fundamentally rooted in kleptocracy.

"Solidarity happens much more among equals," Sarajevo-based psychologist Jasna Bajraktarevic said on a regional talk show on N1 TVon March 18. She stressed that the countries in the region should rely much more on each other than on major global actors.

Tech Wars

This is the latest in a series of articles about the demographic crisis facing Central and Southeast Europe.

See also: Bye-Bye, Balkans: A Region in Critical Demographic Decline

"For 25 years I lived in hope," he said. "Now I hate myself because of that."