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London - British television journalist Terry Lloyd was 'unlawfully killed' by US forces in southern Iraq in 2003, an inquest by a coroner in Britain concluded Friday. Lloyd, who was 50 when he died, had 'disappeared in a hail of American tank fire' as he and three colleagues approached the southern Iraqi port of Basra on a highway on March 22, 2003, the inquest report said. His wife, Lynn, and daughter Chelsey Friday called for the US marine who opened fire on Lloyd's convoy to face murder charges. 'The marines who fired on civilians and those who gave the orders...

Marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the 'Republic of Serbian Krajina', an eloquent comment from IWPR's Balkan Crisis Report by a journalist who covered the parastate's four-year existence for The Independent (London)Ten years ago I sat in the front room of a house in west London in company with a number of Croats, all eyes glued to the fast-changing footage of the satellite television that was carrying programmes from Croatian state television. ‘Come round,’ my friend had said. ‘Something’s up.’ That ‘something’, it turned out, was the ignominious fall of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK), the Serb entity that...

[This] article written for the [Bosnian Institute] website argues that Western politicians have been mistaken in accepting the notion that Kosova is 'an integral part of Serbia', so that Belgrade must necessarily be involved in discussions about Kosova's statusAs negotiations between Serbia and Kosova about the latter’s status are about to begin under UN auspices, one is prompted to pose the obvious question: ‘Why is Serbia involved at all?’ Or, to put it in another way: ‘Why do Western governments assume that the wishes of Kosova’s inhabitants are insufficient grounds for recognising its independence, and that such a step requires also Belgrade’s acquiescence?’Answers to such questions refer...

Montenegrin premier tells Serbia to drop its "mythomanic" policy Text of report by Montenegrin TV on 26 November [Presenter] Montenegro supports international community's decision to begin the process of defining Kosovo's final status, Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic has told Pink TV, adding that it was time for Serbia to give up irrational policy imposed by nationalists. On the eve of [Slovene President] Janez Drnovsek's visit to Montenegro, the prime minister said that the Slovene president was welcome. [Reporter] Assessing that it was about time to solve the status of Kosovo and that a further postponing would not be productive, Prime...

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia (Reuters) - More than 19,000 Bosnian Serbs participated in the massacre at Srebrenica, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, a Bosnian government panel said on Tuesday. Policemen, army officials and civilians worked to enable the killings through tasks that included logistics, transport and communications as well as military operations, according to a report by the inter-ethnic panel. The figure came from a Bosnian government attempt to identify exactly who killed 8,000 Muslims in July 1995 after Bosnian Serb forces captured the town under the protection of U.N. troops. "Among those who took part in the crimes...

Ten Serb policemen accused of having carried out one of the worst massacres in the Kosovo war may soon face justice.By an investigative team in Belgrade and Pristina In the next few days an investigation will be launched against a group of Serbian policemen suspected of having killed 57 members of an Albanian family in Kosovo in spring 1999, Balkan Insight has learned from sources close to the Serbian prosecutor's war crimes office. The slaughter took place in the midst of NATO's air war against Serb forces in Kosovo, which forced them to withdraw from the province that summer. The...

The Serbian mistake of 1918, when the victorious kingdom gambled on [establishing] Yugoslavia, rather than consolidating a compact state of Serbia, continues to haunt Belgrade. Territory governed from Belgrade continues to shrink. Next year, Montenegro can call a referendum to decide whether to secede. -snip- Montenegro is not alone in contemplating exit. Negotiations are likely to begin this year on the status of Kosovo, formally part of Serbia, in reality a ward of the international community, and in the minds of almost all its ethnic Albanian citizens a putative independent state. What goes around comes around. Kosovo was the launching...