It was supposed to be the biggest gathering of Balkan leaders in nearly two decades to show the world the Balkan states aren't, well, Balkanized. But the EU-Balkan summit in Slovenia didn't live up to the billing to highlight regional cooperation and ended with a whimper. The air was taken out of the meeting in Brdo pri Kranju when Serb President Boris Tadic refused to show up. He didn't like the fact Kosovo would be there not as a UN-run protectorate but rather as an independent state. The EU's new so-called president also skipped the meeting, sensing a fiasco was awaiting. Not all were disappointed. Kosovo was pleased to have their independence status at least winked at.
Police in the fractured Balkan state of Bosnia have launched what is being called the largest raid against followers of the radicial Wahhabi branch of Islam since the end of the country's 1992-1995 war. Some 600 police from Bosnia's Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat federation took part in the Feb. 2 operation, codenamed "Light." Arrests were made and guns and explosives seized in the raid in Gornja Maoca, in the north. What are Islamic terrorists doing in Europe? You can thank Washington's and Brussel's Balkans policy for that.
Serbia has filed genocide charges against neighboring Croatia, in a move likely to plunge bilateral ties between the two former Yugoslav republics to new lows and upset the already shaky stability of the Balkans. Serbia said it was left with no choice but to file the papers at the International Court of Justice at The Hague after Croatia refused to drop a similar case against the Serbs.
