Muhamet Alidemaj, a former member of the Serbian police, was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment by the Prishtina Basic Court for participating in a massacre at Izbice during the Kosovo war in March 1999, when around 130 people were shot dead. The Prishtina Basic Court on Friday found Muhamet Alidemaj, a former member of the…
Kosovo government protests as European Commission scraps visa requirement for its residents who hold Serbian passports issued by Serbia’s Directorate for Kosovo. Kosovo residents, most of them Serbs, who have passports issued by Serbia’s Directorate for Kosovo, until now less valuable than standard Serbian passports, will now be able to cross the external border of…
Serbian authorities attempted to legitimize the terrorist attack in the north of Kosovo by presenting it as an effort to protect Serb minorities from the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. This narrative draws parallels to the Russian Federation’s legitimation attempts for its aggression against neighboring countries, as in the case of Ukraine. In the north of…
Securing funding is not the only problem that some film festivals face. Yuliia Kovalenko, a Ukrainian film critic and programmer at Docudays in Kyiv who was involved in the Focus on Ukraine programme at Dokufest, told BIRN that her annual event was first hit by COVID-19 and then by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022….
Amid tensions over the possible reopening of the main bridge in Mitrovica, an EU official told BIRN that the issue will be returned to the dialogue table in Brussels and warned Kosovo not to open the bridge without prior coordination. Workers were patiently refurbishing the main Mitrovica bridge in north Kosovo on Friday afternoon as,…
David Loyn, a BBC correspondent during the Kosovo war recounts moments of his work in a country that was descending to armed conflict. David Loyn, a BBC correspondent who reported on the war in Kosovo in 1998- 1999, maintains that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s actions in Kosovo amounted to ethnic cleansing. He emphasised that the…
The Kosovo Court of Appeals upheld the first-instance decision to annul the Independent Media Commission’s ‘warning’ to the show “Jeta në Kosovë” after airing the investigative report “Unclean Energy: The Kosovar Who Would Own the Sun”, considering it as unlawful and unfair. The Kosovo Court of Appeals, on Wednesday, announced that it rejected the Independent…
Jufka is a new pasta and pizza restaurant in Prishtina that opened at the beginning of March this year. It is situated in the rapidly developing southern end of Dragodan, close to the neighbourhood’s numerous other new restaurants like Commandante Marcos and Thana Rosticeri. Despite being easy to reach on the main road, the restaurant…
A former Austrian diplomat in Serbia told the trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and three co-accused that the Kosovo Liberation Army claimed to be far more organised than it was. A former Austrian diplomat in Serbia, Jan Kickert, told the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in the Hague, at the war crimes and crimes against…
Government says ban on use of popular social media platform in state institutions reflects security risks and follows the example set by many other countries. The Kosovo government on June 28 banned use of the social media network TikTok in state institutions amid growing global concerns over its potential vulnerability to cyber threats. Bardhyl Dobra,…