Balkaninsight.com

While millions of Christians prepare for Easter celebrations across the Balkans, political, economic and ethnic tensions are casting a dark shadow over the season of goodwill. 

The failure of the local and international community to properly address Kosovo's traumatic past has left its communities alienated and mistrustful of official initiatives.

The Franciscans of Fojnica have held their ground in this little town over an incredible 700 years of wars, guarding treasures of Bosnia’s past and serving as a symbol of the country’s unbroken history.

After the prosecution indicted 14 people, mostly Serbs, over the alleged coup plot last October, doubts about what really happened on election day remain as strong as ever.

In what many see as yet another example of the government's frivolous attitude to spending, most of the expensive palms imported from China and planted to bring a 'tropical feel' to the Macedonian capital have died.

Yet another Balkan country is swept by a wave of popular – and unexpected - protests, while the theme of authoritarian progress across the region continues to be a dominant one among this week’s articles.  

A claim by a right-wing Five Star Movement lawmaker that Romania is exporting criminals to Italy has raised fears of a possible repeat of the anti-Romanian hate crime surge of 2008. 

‘Zeri’ editor Arbana Xharra says she won’t stop probing the dark side of Kosovo life despite the ‘public lynches that have become the new normality’ for investigative journalists in the country.

Former Ombudsman Sasa Jankovic will try to capitalise on his second place in the presidential elections by setting up a political movement to oppose the poll winner, PM Aleksandar Vucic.

Businesses and ordinary people need to work together if fragile Black Sea environments are not to be overwhelmed and degraded by mass tourism, experts warn

The editorial council of Croatian left-wing newspaper Novi list condemned an article published in its own pages that denounced an anti-nationalist public declaration about the similarities in ex-Yugoslav languages.

Mladen Grujicic, the first Serb mayor of Srebrenica, has again said that he does not accept that the massacres of Bosniaks from the town in July 1995 constituted genocide.

Good Macedonia-Albanian relations may fall victim to the internal power struggle in Macedonia, which has seen Tirana accused of plotting to subvert the country.

With the aid of foreign investment, new construction projects are starting to bloom in the Serbian capital.

The reconstruction of a 16th Century Ottoman-era mosque, the last of 15 that were destroyed during the 1992-95 war in the Bosnian Serbs’ main city of Banja Luka, is finally ready to start.

As membership of NATO looms ever closer, almost the last hopes of anti-NATO groups in Montenegro lie in persuading the Dutch people to block the process in a referendum.

Kosovo opposition parties are urging MPs to back their new motion to overthrow Isa Mustafa's government in their latest attempt to oust the ruling coalition.

One of Albania’s best-known writers, Ismail Kadare, said that he wants to see his secret police file to find out who spied on him during the Communist era.

Thousands of people are hitting the streets nightly across Serbia, protesting against the rule of Serbia’s Prime Minister and President-elect, Aleksandar Vucic. BIRN has prepared a guide containing the main facts about the protest movement.

Bosnian Serbs in Visegrad, which was majority-Bosniak before the war, inaugurated a monument in the shape of an Orthodox Christian cross dedicated to Russian volunteers who fought on the Serb side, angering war victims’ groups.