States with limited recognition

Kosovo will see significant price rises and an overall reduction in its purchasing power as a result of the high taxes it has imposed on imports from Serbia and Bosnia, experts have warned.

A recent assessment by Veritas Global, a Swiss company that provides economic services, claims that because of this significant fall in purchasing power, Kosovar citizens will buy less goods.

The soft rays of the morning sun fall upon her pale hands as they rest on the stack of papers on the table. She does not raise her eyes as she looks down at the documents in front of her.

Members of civil society groups in Kosovo accused the security guards of the ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, of pushing them away from the party building on Monday as they were protesting in a "March for Refusal", as they called it, over the new bill on financing political parties.

Vasfije Krasniqi Goodman. Photo: BIRN.

Kosovo's Special Prosecutor Drita Hajdari told BIRN on Friday that she tried for some time to find a legal basis to reopen the case of Vasfije Krasniqi Goodman, but did not succeed.

"To reopen a case, new proof is needed… but only if it is in favour of the defendant, not against him," she said.

Crowds of people gathered in central Pristina on Wednesday to celebrate the anniversary of the end of the war 20 years ago and applaud former US President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who were key advocates of NATO's military intervention.

Bill Clinton was honoured by Kosovo on Tuesday for his role in ordering the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which led to the end of the war 20 years ago.

The exhibition of images of women who were victims of sexual violence during the Kosovo war, created by architect turned politician Eliza Hoxha, opened on Tuesday in the basement of the Grand Hotel in Pristina.

The basement, where women were raped and ethnic Albanians killed during the conflict, has been closed to the public for the past 20 years since the war ended.

The International Organisation for Migration launched the project to produce a 20,000-word Albanian-Serbian online dictionary in Pristina on Monday, aimed at helping the country's ethnic Albanians and Serbs communicate better.

The IOM plans to complete the Albanian-Serbian online dictionary project, believed to be the first of its kind, by September 2019.

These beautiful creatures bathe their gorgeous bodies in rivers, protect honest people, but become merciless when they decide to punish injustice. (As far as I know Serbs have their own version of the Zana, the Vila). I have always been impressed by the fact that a strong patriarchal culture, like that in the Balkans, crafted fairy tales with strong women as protagonists.

The High Court in Podgorica on Wednesday sentenced Vlado Zmajevic to 14 years in prison for war crimes against the civilian population.

Zmajevic, who was part of Yugoslav Army forces fighting in Kosovo, was found guilty of the murder of four Albanian civilians in the village of Zegra near Gnjilane in Kosovo during the war in 1999.