Free Republic

Yugoslav Police trying to salvage the nation in face of attack by the minority Muslim and Catholic rioters.

WARSAW, Poland -- Bosnian church leaders defended their decision to hold a Mass for civilians and former soldiers slaughtered by victorious communist forces in Yugoslavia, despite international condemnations and domestic protests. Msgr. Ivo Tomasevic, secretary-general of the Sarajevo-based bishops' conference, told Catholic News Service the Mass in Sarajevo's Sacred Heart Cathedral, led by Cardinal Vinko Puljic, marked the 75th anniversary of the massacre of mostly ethnic Croatian internees sent back to what was then Yugoslavia from a camp in Bleiburg, Austria. The annual Mass, held at Bleiburg since Yugoslavia's 1991 breakup, has been criticized by some European politicians for alleged...

General Dragoljub Draza Mihailovich THIS WAS GENERAL DRAZA MIHAILOVICH There is no grave site. There is no marker for his remains. It is as if they wanted to remove him not just from the earth but from the history of his country and the consciousness of his people. But they failed. Nowhere is this more evident than in those hills of Serbia they call Ravna Gora. And it is in those Ravna Gora hills where the true soul and spirit of Serbia can still be found. July 17th is an important day for those who knew who he was and...

During its recent press conference, the agency said that this particularly applied to Somalis, but also immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Finland, Turkey, Iran, the former Yugoslavia, and Eritrea.

"The Republic of North Macedonia is officially the new, 30th NATO member," the government in Skopje said in a statement. "We have fulfilled the dream of generations." From NATO headquarters, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared: "North Macedonia is now part of the NATO family.” It was a family of 30 nations and almost 1 billion people "based on the certainty that, no matter what challenges we face, we are all stronger and safer together,” Stoltenberg added. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said a long journey had finally come to an end. "North Macedona's NATO accession increases security and stability across...

Remembering Halyard Mission Veteran Major Richard L. Felman U.S.A.F. - A Tireless Warrior for the Truth Aleksandra's Note: It's been 20 years since Major Richard Felman of the U.S.A.F. left us. This dynamic, unforgettable man was one of the Halyard Mission American rescues of 1944 who spent the rest of his life honoring the people who saved him and over 500 of his brothers from the Nazis in World War Two. He was determined to repay the "debt of gratitude" to General Draza Mihailovich, his Chetniks, and the Serbian people loyal to them, and he succeeded. As the daughter of...

Rudy Giuliani: The witness I relied upon if you paid any attention to what I did last week is someone named Victor Shokin. That’s the affidavit I put out plus two others… Those three all say that Joe Biden pressured the president to fire Shokin because Shokin had just come upon a laundered $3 million transaction to Hunter Biden. And he was told by the Serbian government that the United States government would not allow to give that information out. That’s the reason they say they were fired… That’s a lot stronger proof than any silly whistleblower nonsense about something...

The United Nations Human Rights Council and U.N. member states have been told that they have a “legal obligation” to confront China over its practice of forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong adherents. Addressing the council in Geneva on Sept. 24, London-based lawyer Hamid Sabi presented the findings from a report released in June by the China Tribunal, or the Independent Tribunal Into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China. The tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who previously led the prosecution of former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal, concluded beyond reasonable doubt...

The controversy over President Trump’s pullout on the Turkish–Syrian border will settle down quickly. It is another useful debunking of ancient shibboleths and decrepit truisms, like the long-impregnable encrustation of false wisdom that moving the U.S embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would unleash hell upon the whole Middle East. There are about 35 million Kurds, approximately half of them in Turkey, where they make up about a fifth of Turkey’s population. A century ago almost all the Kurds had been in the Ottoman Empire, which the Allied powers broke up after World War I, a foolish decision that is on...

Serbian refugees leaving Krajina in August of 1995 during Croatia's "Operation Storm" / "Oluja". Author of photo unknown at this time. Remembering the Fall of Krajina - "Operation Storm" / "Oluja", when the Croatians committed the great War Crime of Ethnic Cleansing against the Serbs that has never been punished. The "War Years" of the 1990's for those of us who cared about what was happening in the former Yugoslavia were years that remain permanently etched in our hearts and in our consciousness. Many events over the course of those years made a significant impact, but for some of...

Macedonia's left-wing prime minister said he is ready to renounce his country's claim to be the sole heirs of the legacy of Alexander the Great to help solve a 26-year-old dispute with neighboring Greece over the country's name. "I give up (the claim) of Macedonia being the sole heir to Alexander. The history belongs not only to us, but also to Greece and many other countries," Zoran Zaev, in power since the spring, said in an interview to TV station Telma late Friday. Since its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, Macedonia has claimed at least part of the heritage of...

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1948 Ex-Mufti, Criminal Ally State Dept. Conceals Promised White Paper Book; Uses Whitewash Instead By OBSERVER On Mar. 19, 1942, the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem spoke to the Arab world by Rome radio and said: “If, God forbid, America and her allies are victorious in this war . . . then the world will become hell, God forbid. But Allah is too just and merciful to grant such murderous violators any victory.” After a long struggle and supreme sacrifices, the “murderous violators” became victors. They entered Germany while the ex-Mufti was still there with the bags of gold...

As Milosevic's intelligence chief, Jovica Stanisic is accused of setting up genocidal death squads. But as a valuable source for the CIA, an agency veteran says, he also 'did a whole lot of good.' By Greg Miller March 1, 2009 Reporting from Belgrade, Serbia -- At night, when the lawns are empty and the lamps along the walking paths are the only source of light, Topcider Park on the outskirts of Belgrade is a perfect meeting place for spies. It was here in 1992, as the former Yugoslavia was erupting in ethnic violence, that a wary CIA agent made his...

Although temperatures in the Balkans are rising, neither budding flowers nor mass protests should be mistaken for the beginning of a Balkan Spring modeled on the revolutions that rocked the Arab world in 2011. The protesters’ main problem is that they’re unable to apply any political pressure on the government by rallying around a candidate that might threaten Vucic’s stranglehold on national politics. The entirety of the anti-Vucic ideological spectrum is represented—from student Marxists to Bosko Obradovic, the ultranationalist leader of Dveri, a far-right opposition party of religious conservatives—sometimes causing scuffles among the protesters. This highlights the fragmented and impotent...

- The Yugoslav Wars started in 1991, but never really ended. - Kosovo and Serbia are still enemies, and they're getting worse. - A proposed land swap could create peace – or reignite the conflict. The government of Serbia has made its peace and established diplomatic relations with all other former Yugoslav countries, but not with Kosovo. In Serbian eyes, Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 was a unilateral and therefore legally invalid change of state borders. Despite their current conflict, Kosovo and Serbia have the same long-term objective: Membership of the European Union. Ironically, that wish could lead to...

By April 1992, with its Soviet ally freshly dissolved, Yugoslavia as the world had known it was gone in a bloody and violent breakup, leaving some 100,000 dead, 2.4 million refugees, 2 million internally displaced, and seven independent nations in its place. While those ethnic tensions still simmer in much of the former Yugoslavia, so too is a growing sentimental recollection of life in a country much of the younger generations can only learn about in history books and museums like Milakovic’s Yugodom. A Gallup poll from last year showed that many people in the former Yugoslavia look back fondly...

Four Russian diplomats will be banned from Greece after evidence revealed Russia was trying to foment opposition to a historic deal between Greece and Macedonia that is likely to pave the way for Macedonia’s Nato membership and so weaken Russian influence in the western Balkans. Russia, involved in a wider struggle for influence with the EU across the region, has already been accused of backing a failed coup in Montenegro in 2016. Russia said it would respond to the Greek expulsions by taking similar steps against Greek diplomats in Moscow. The expulsion of the diplomats, revealed in the Greek media...

Federal authorities on Wednesday began legal proceedings to strip U.S. citizenship from two Bosnians, including one living in Oregon, for war crimes including executing civilians during that country’s civil war in the 1990s. The move by the U.S. Justice Department comes years after Rasema Handanovic and Edin Dzeko were extradited and later convicted by courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2011. After serving her sentence, Handanovic returned to Beaverton, Oregon, according to a statement from the Justice department, while Dzeko has not yet been released by Bosnian authorities. The department filed denaturalization lawsuits against the pair in federal courts in...

More than 3,000 Serbs came together on Saturday at the Serbian Orthodox Church’s official ceremony in honor of the victims of the 1999 NATO bombing in Yugoslavia. The victims were remembered throughout the country, but the main ceremony took place in the town of Aleksinac in southern Serbia, often known as “Serbian Hiroshima,” reports the Serbian Orthodox Church. On the day of the 19th anniversary of the tragedy, His Grace Bishop Arseny of Niš served a panikhida in memory of all the victims and offered a homily. The clergy and representatives of the president of the republic laid flowers at...

While First Lady Melania Trump may want to visit "a desert island" for the holidays, her popularity may be inspiring others to flock to her native country, Slovenia. Slovenia reported a 9 percent hike in tourism revenue this year, Reuters reported, with a 23.4 percent increase in tourists from the United States. The first lady was even more popular among Americans than her husband, President Donald Trump, according to a December Gallup poll. Tourists may be exploring the central European country but Melania Trump would rather escape on a tropical vacation. On December 8, she paid a visit to the...