Walk the busy streets of Skopje, North Macedonia’s capital, and amidst the loud two-way car traffic there lies just off the city’s main plaza a large factory complex a visitor could quickly pass by without much thought. TKS Imperial Tobacco stands at the site of the former Monopol tobacco factory, a landmark in pre-war Skopje sitting adjacent to the railway […]

Photo: Media Center Belgrade In March 2020, when the President of Serbia declared a state of emergency and, listing various “difficult moments for our country”, mentioned Srebrenica, it wasn’t really clear what an act of genocide committed 25 years ago has to do with the coronavirus pandemic. The truth is – there is nothing connecting the two events. Actually, the […]

Twenty years has passed since the siege of Dubrovnik, which lasted from October 1, 1991 to the last days of June in 1992. One of the most beautiful cities, and not just in the region, was shelled by the ex-Yugoslavian Army and Montenegrin reserve forces. While monuments were being demolished, houses burned, and people killed, the assault on Dubrovnik was […]

Photo: BIRN For quite some time, the “economic normalization” between Serbia and Kosovo has been one of the crucial topics for the Serbian public. This has particularly been the case in the last three weeks, ever since the meeting in the White House and the signing of those documents. Even more than the general public, notable experts have combed through […]

Despite the extraordinary developments and huge achievements in the fields of medicine, technology etc., even in the second decade of XXI century it was attested that things may change very rapidly, and the priorities too. While the COVID-19 pandemic officially emerged in Chine by the end of December 2019, the first confirmed case in Kosovo dates to 13 March 2020. […]

In many countries of the world, recounting individual stories, individual experiences of wars, as part of the historic dialogue, has impacted the shaping of public opinion and has mitigated the perception of the past, as a phase that needs to be elaborated in the public discourse without any stigmatization or prejudice, without employing any selection or barriers whatsoever. It is […]

The world is experiencing a pandemic that was caused by the new Covid-19 virus, also known as coronavirus. From the city of Wuhan in China, the virus has spread rapidly and unexpectedly around the world. For half a year now, the world has been counting confirmed positive cases every day. The countries are ranked by the number of infected, healed, […]

One of the most important struggles in ”games of power” is the struggle for meaning. Those who are in a position of power have managed to convince the people keeping them there with their consent that the world is the way the high and mighty see it. In our region, they frequently admit that the present is difficult, but that […]

It was supposed to be a routine liquidation of civilians, one of many that were committed by the intervention squad of the Prijedor police forces in 1992. A path carved into rocks on the slopes of Vlašić mountain seemed appropriate to them. A cliff with sharp rocks and a deep and deadly abyss below it simply lured them into stopping […]

Photo: YIHR Translation: Luna Đorđević How do you deal with the fact that you have both positive and negative feelings about something that happened? Is it possible for an event to be at the same time both victory and defeat, both legal and criminal? What’s the relationship between ethnicity and emotion when we think about Operation Storm? If I am […]

A war-time anecdote I remember is the one about men who were taken to dig trenches. The digging lasted for days, and when they got food for the first time, it was a can of luncheon meat for two men. One of them opened the can and put it between the two of them. As soon as the can touched […]

Translation: Luna Đorđević Remembering the Srebrenica genocide in today’s Serbia, or rather the lack of memory, the denial of genocide and the understating of the number of victims, is inseparable from the wider context of the official and the dominant memory politics. The establishment of political hegemony of the Serbian Progressive Party in 2012 went hand in hand with the […]