Slobodan Milošević

Three brigades of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Army took part in fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 and, like the special operations unit of Serbian state security, were known as 'Red Berets', a defence witness in the retrial of two top Serbian state security officials in The Hague said on Thursday.

Two Bosnian war victims' groups, the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide and the Mothers of Srebrenica, held a small protest on Tuesday outside the Swedish embassy in Sarajevo to express anger about a letter from the Nobel Committee defending the award of this year's prestigious literature prize to Austrian author Peter Handke.

Senior presidential, government and municipal officials, as well as representatives of war veterans, laid flowers on Friday in front of the monument dubbed 'Mother's Broken Wing' in central Skopje in memory of the 54 young Macedonians who lost their lives amid the collapse of the federal Yugoslav state.

The Humanitarian Law Centre NGO said in a report published on Wednesday that in the summer of 1995, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs forcibly mobilised around 10,000 refugees and took them back to territories under the control of the Bosnian Serb Army in Bosnia and the rebel Serb-run Army of the Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia.

The UN-backed Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has announced that it has extended Jovica Stanisic's provisional release until April 30, 2020 because of his continuing illness.

It said that the extension was possible because "there is no indication that he has ever engaged in any practice undermining the administration of justice".

Austrian writer Peter Handke, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for literature, confirmed on Thursday evening that he was given a Yugoslav passport in 1999 when the country was under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic.

Members of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide and their supporters gathered on Tuesday in front of the Swedish embassy in Sarajevo to protest against the decision last month by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to award the Nobel Prize for literature to author Peter Handke, who took a pro-Serb stance during wartime.

Former intelligence official Vlado Dragicevic told the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Thursday that Slobodan Milosevic and some of his close allies did not trust Serbian State Security Service, SDB chief Jovica Stanisic, who is being retried for committing wartime crimes in collaboration with Milosevic and others.

Unlike others, I never felt that the UK was immune to secessionism. Perhaps it was my experience of working on the Western Balkans. It always struck me that the British, more than any other European country, should pay special attention to the collapse of Yugoslavia.

The news particularly angered Albanians, who say he is "known for his firm stance opposing NATO bombing, which brought "freedom to Kosovo." Similar reactions are coming from the USA.