Serb President Boris Tadic have urged Kosovo Serbs to refrain from violence, hours after ethnic Serbs torched a border crossing in the north.
The arrest of Ratko Mladic is a major step towards reconciliation in the Balkans, analysts have said, but the region is still a long way from healing.
Serbs began voting on Sunday in an election that will show whether the lure of European Union membership outweighs their anger over the Western-backed secession of Kosovo. The country is divided and the two frontrunners, the nationalist Radical Party and the pro-Western Democratic Party, will have to woo smaller parties to form a coalition.
Serbia’s neighbours in Croatia, Hungary and Bulgaria dealt a blow to the Serb campaign to overturn Kosovo’s month-old independence on Wednesday by announcing they would recognise the new republic. In a joint statement issued in Zagreb, Budapest and Sofia, they said the decision was based on ”thorough consideration”.
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica dramatically resigned on Saturday, saying his government had collapsed over the issue of Kosovo’s declaration of independence last month. Plunging the country into a new political crisis, he said he would call national elections for May 11.
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/ 4 February 2008
From Monday morning Serbia faces up to a bruising battle over how to react to the looming secession of its southern province of Kosovo, after President Boris Tadic, a pro-Western liberal, won a renewed five-year term in a close election on Sunday night.
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/ 2 February 2008
A former cemeteries manager known as the ”Undertaker” stands his best chance of becoming head of state when Serbia votes on Sunday in a fateful presidential election. To his many critics, the extreme nationalist Tomislav Nikolic will be digging Serbia’s grave if he repeats his first-round victory.
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/ 27 November 2007
Internationally sponsored talks over the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo were deadlocked on Tuesday, after Kosovo Albanian leaders rejected Serbia’s proposal for self-governance. Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population wants to break all ties with Serbia.
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/ 26 November 2007
Serbia will not give up ”an inch” of Kosovo, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Monday as talks on the breakaway province’s future entered a critical phase before a United Nations deadline next month. ”Serbia will not let an inch of its territory be taken away,” a defiant Kostunica told reporters.