KYIV — Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren says Ukraine should receive its first F-16 fighter jets this summer as Europe pushes to aid Kyiv amid complications sparked by a stalled aid package in the U.S. Congress.
Ollongren told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service during a visit to Kyiv on March 21 that a plan to deliver 24 F-16s jets is on track, with the first aircraft coming from Denmark.
Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine
RFE/RL’s Live Briefinggives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.
“I think we are on track to see deliveries, first Danish this summer, and then we’re going to scale up,” she said while declining to give the exact number of planes involved in the first delivery.
“We know that we will start with the Danish F-16s, that is now in our planning and in the Ukrainian planning. And in the end, I mean, it doesn’t matter anymore. If it’s a Dutch or Danish or Norwegian F-16 because [the planes are] going to be Ukrainian.”
The arrival of the fighter jets will be a long-awaited development to help Kyiv fill a crucial hole in its defense capabilities.
Russia has used its more advanced and more numerous jets to repeatedly bomb Ukrainian cities, slow its counteroffensive, and threaten its ships exporting grain crucial to its economic survival, making Kyiv’s acquisition of modern U.S. jets a key ingredient to its successful defense of the country.
Ukraine inherited an aging fleet of Soviet MiG and Sukhoi jets that lack the strike depth and technology of modern Russian jets, putting Kyiv at a significant disadvantage in the war. Ukraine also has a much smaller fleet than Russia.
The more advanced F-16s would allow Ukrainian pilots to strike deep into Russian controlled areas and with great accuracy, intercept missiles that have terrorized Ukraine cities, and take on Russian jets that threaten its shipping lanes.
Ollongren said the key to the effectiveness of the jets will be the training of both pilots and technical staff to ensure they operate at peak performance.
“It is of no use if you don’t know how to use [them] most effectively, and that requires training and that requires the right people for the maintenance and the right infrastructure. So when you get [them], you know that you will be able to use [them],” she said.
“So once…Ukraine gets the F-16, everything has to be in place, including, of course, how to protect them.”
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country has been backed by the United States, the European Union, and other Western allies.
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Kyiv Slammed By Russian Missile Barrage, Injuring Civilians
Russia launched a missile attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, early on March 21, injuring at least 10 people and damaging residential buildings and industrial facilities, city officials said.
But a new $60-billion aid package to Ukraine has been stalled in the U.S. House of Representatives as Republican lawmakers demand deep changes to domestic immigration policy.
With Washington’s funding spigots turned off for the time being, the European Union has been moving to increase its assistance.
Earlier this week, the European Council approved the creation of the Ukraine Assistance Fund (UAF) and earmarked 5 billion euros ($5.4 billion) for it to be used for the provision of both “lethal and nonlethal military equipment and training.”
Ollongren said the holdup in the United States on new aid is “a bit frustrating,” but given the threat Russia’s aggression poses to Europe, the 27-nation EU will continue to push to increase aid levels.
“We are working on increasing production levels…For Ukraine, it’s an existential threat. But for Europe, it’s also an existential threat. So it is in our best interest,” to continue aid to Kyiv, she said.
“It’s also in the America’s best interest to continue that support and to step it up and to do more,” she added.
KYIV — Ukrainian officials on January 27 said Russia had intensified attacks in the past 24 hours, with a commander saying the sides had battled through “50 combat clashes” in the past day near Ukraine’s Tavria region.
Meanwhile, Kyiv and Moscow continued to dispute the circumstances surrounding the January 24 crash of a Russian military transport plane that the Kremlin claimed was carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Kyiv said it has no proof POWs were aboard and has not confirmed its forces shot down the plane.
Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine
RFE/RL’s Live Briefinggives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.
General Oleksandr Tarnavskiy, the Ukrainian commander in the Tavria zone in the Zaporizhzhya region, said Russian forces had “significantly increased” the number of offensive and assault operations over the past two days.
“For the second day in a row, the enemy has conducted 50 combat clashes daily,” he wrote on Telegram.
“Also, the enemy has carried out 100 air strikes in the operational zone of the Tavria Joint Task Force within seven days,” he said, adding that 230 Russian-launched drones had been “neutralized or destroyed” over the past day in the area.
Battlefield claims on either side cannot immediately be confirmed.
Earlier, the Ukrainian military said 98 combat clashes took place between Ukrainian troops and the invading Russian army over the past 24 hours.
“There are dead and wounded among the civilian populations,” the Ukrianian military’s General Staff said in its daily update, but did not provide further details about the casualties.
According to the General Staff, Russian forces launched eight missile and four air strikes, and carried out 78 attacks from rocket-salvo systems on Ukrainian troop positions and populated areas. Iranian-made Shahed drones and Iskander ballistic missiles were used in the attacks, it said.
A number of “high-rise residential buildings, schools, kindergartens, a shopping center, and other civilian infrastructure were destroyed or damaged” in the latest Russian strikes, the bulletin said.
“More than 120 settlements came under artillery fire in the Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolayiv regions,” according to the daily update.
The General Staff also reported that Ukrainian defenders repelled dozens of Russian assaults in eight directions, including Avdiyivka, Bakhmut, Maryinka, and Kupyansk in the eastern Donetsk region.
Meanwhile, Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, said it remained unclear what happened in the crash of the Russian Il-76 that the Kremlin claimed was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were killed along with nine crew members.
The Kremlin said the military transport plane was shot down by a Ukrainian missile despite the fact that Russian forces had alerted Kyiv to the flight’s path.
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov told RFE/RL that it had not received either a written or verbal request to secure the airspace where the plane went down.
The situation with the crash of the aircraft “is not yet fully understood,” Budanov said.
“It is necessary to determine what happened – unfortunately, neither side can fully answer that yet.”
Russia “of course, has taken the position of blaming Ukraine for everything, despite the fact that there are a number of facts that are inconsistent with such a position,” he added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted Ukraine shot down the plane and said an investigation was being carried out, with a report to be made in the upcoming days.
In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the creation of a second body to assist businesses in the war-torn country.
Speaking in his nightly video address late on January 26, Zelenskiy said the All-Ukraine Economic Platform would help businesses overcome the challenges posed by Russia’s nearly two-year-old invasion.
On January 23, Zelenskiy announced the formation of a Council for the Support of Entrepreneurship, which he said sought to strengthen the country’s economy and clarify issues related to law enforcement agencies. Decrees creating both bodies were published on January 26.
Ukraine’s economy has collapsed in many sectors since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Kyiv heavily relies on international aid from its Western partnes.
The Voice of America reported that the United States vowed to promote at the international level a peace formula put forward by Zelenskiy.
VOA quoted White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby as saying that Washington “is committed to the policy of supporting initiatives emanating from the leadership of Ukraine.”
Zelenskiy last year presented his 10-point peace formula that includes the withdrawal of Russian forces and the restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity, among other things.
Building Europe to have peace. Such is the just and fine ambition that one must pursue relentlessly. Nevertheless, it is necessary to define ‘Europe’ and to specify the conditions for the peace that is desirable on our continent.
For Europe is a continent. Only de Gaulle had envisaged Europe as a geopolitical ensemble composed of all the states participating in balance. François Mitterrand took up the idea in the form of a European confederation, but he too quickly abandoned it.
Since 1945, what is presented as ‘Europe’, in the West of the continent, is only a subset of countries incapable by themselves of ensuring peace. One regularly hides its powerlessness behind proud slogans. Such is the case with that which affirms ‘Europe means Peace’. As a historical reality and as promise it is false.
During the Cold War, it is not the organs of the Common Market, of the European Economic Community then of the European Union which have assured peace in Europe. It is well known that the equilibrium between the great powers has been maintained by nuclear dissuasion and, more precisely, by the potential for massive destruction possessed by the US, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France.
NATO forces under American command offered Western Europe a fragile umbrella, since the US would not have put their very existence in jeopardy to prevent a very improbable land-based offensive by the Soviet Army. Ready for all possibilities but not prepared to pay the price of a classic confrontation, France, having left the integrated command of NATO in 1966, considered the territory of West Germany as a buffer zone for its Pluton nuclear-armed missiles.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has pushed into the background the debates on nuclear dissuasion, but it is still not possible to glorify a ‘Europe’ pacific and peace-making. For thirty years we have seen the «peace of cemeteries» established on our periphery, and under the responsibility of certain members states of the European Union.
The principal states of the EU carry an overwhelming responsibility in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Germany, supported by the Vatican, unilaterally recognises Slovenia and Croatia on 23 December 1991, which pushes the then “Twelve” to follow this lethal route. France could have opposed this decision. It gives up this option because, on 15 December in Council, François Mitterrand reaffirms his conviction: it is more important to preserve the promises of Maastricht than to attempt to impose the French position on Yugoslavia. In other words, Yugoslavia has been deliberately sacrificed on the altar of “Franco-German friendship“, when one could already see that Berlin lied, manoeuvred and imposed its will. The German ambition was to support Croatia, including by the delivery of arms, in a war that would be pursued with a comparable cruelty by all the camps.
The recognition of Slovenia and Croatia embroiled Bosnia-Herzegovina and provoked the extension of the conflict, then its internationalisation. Tears would be shed for Sarajevo while forgetting Mostar. Some Parisian intellectuals would demand, in the name of ‘Europe’, an attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then comprising Serbia, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro. Their wish was granted in 1999 when NATO, under American commandment, bombed Yugoslav territory for 78 days, killing thousands of civilians. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium … participated in this military operation, in contempt of the UN Charter and of NATO statutes, an alliance theoretically defensive …
Let no one pretend that the principal member states of the EU were waging humanitarian wars and wanted to assure economic development and democracy. ‘Europe’ has protested against ethnic cleansing by Serbs but has left the Croats to force out 200,000 Serbs from Krajina. ‘Europe’ waxes indignant about massacres in Kosovo but it has supported extremist ethnic Albanians of the Kosovo Liberation Army who have committed multiple atrocities before and after their arrival to power in Pristina.
These Balkan wars occurred in the previous Century, but it is not ancient history. The countries devastated by war suffer henceforth the indifference of the powerful. In Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, one lives poorly, very poorly, if one is not involved in illegal business networks. Then one seeks work elsewhere, preferably in Germany, if one is not too old.
After having mistreated, pillaged then abandoned its peripheries, ‘peaceful’ Europe then goes to serve as an auxiliary force in American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is true that Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron were in the forefront in the bombardment of Libya, but the outcome is as disastrous as in the Middle East and Central Asia – graveyards, chaos, the hate of the West and, at Kabul, the return of the Taliban.
This brief review of the deadly inconsistencies of European pacificism cannot ignore Ukraine. The European Commission itself has encouraged the Ukrainian government in its quest for integration in the EU, before proposing a simple accord of association. The Ukrainian government, having declined to sign this accord, the pro-European groups allied to the ultranationalists have descended into the street in November 2013 with the support of Germany, Poland and the US. The Maidan movement, the eviction of President Yanukovych and the war of the Donbass have led, after the Minsk accords and a stalemate in the conflict to the situation that we have before our eyes in early January – the US and Russia discuss directly the Ukrainian crisis without the ‘Europe of peace’ being admitted to the negotiating table. The EU has totally subjugated itself to NATO and does not envisage leaving it.
It is therefore possible to note, once again, the vacuity of the discourse on the ‘European power’ and on ‘European sovereignty’. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we should acknowledge all the opportunities lost. After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, France could have demanded the withdrawal of American forces installed in Europe and proposed a collective security treaty for the entirety of the continent, while pursuing its project for a European Confederation. From Right to Left, our governments have preferred to cultivate the myth of the “Franco-German friendship”, leave the US to pursue its agenda after the upheaval of 2003, and then return to the integrated command of NATO.
They offer us not peace but submission to war-making forces that they have given up trying to control.
*****
• Translated by Evan Jones (a francophile and retired political economist at University of Sydney) and is published here with permission from author.
Dissident couple say their lives would be under threat if returned from Bosnia to Kuwait, as rights groups claim notice undermines refugee law
A Kuwaiti princess seeking asylum in Bosnia-Herzegovina has claimed the Kuwaiti state is using an Interpol red notice to intimidate and harass her and force the extradition of her partner, a prominent dissident blogger, back to the country.
Sheikha Moneera Fahad al-Sabah and Mesaed al-Mesaileem, said they face torture and threats to their lives if they are returned to Kuwait due to their political activism.
The Goldman Environmental Prize, the “green Nobel Prize”, is awarded annually to activists fighting for the well-being of the planet. They’re often called “heroes”. But, foremost, they’re people. Common folk just like us. They don’t have superpowers or wear capes. And that’s what makes them so special. They’re the activists that are celebrated yearly by the Goldman Environmental Prize, also known as the “green Nobel Prize” [for more on this award and its laureates, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/928A7FD2-4E3D-400E-BCE9-488658DA3BAF]
The winners of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize
Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, Malawi, Africa
Concerned about the environmental damage caused by plastic pollution in the southeast African state of Malawi, Gloria Majiga-Kamoto decided to fight against this industry by campaigning to stop the production of thin plastics, a type of single-use polymer. Thanks to her campaign a national ban was adopted in 2019. This is the first time a person from Malawi wins the Goldman Prize.
Thai Van Nguyen is the founder of the NGO Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, responsible for saving 1,540 pangolins from the illegal wildlife trade between 2014 and 2020. Nguyen also instituted the first Vietnamese anti-poaching unit. Since 2018, it has destroyed 9,701 animal traps, torn down 775 illegal camps, confiscated 78 guns and brought to the arrest of 558 poachers, leading to a significant reduction in illegal activities in Pu Mat National Park.
Together with the women in her village, Maida Bilal mounted a 503-days-long protest to stop the construction of two new dams on the Kruščica River in December 2018. The Balkans are home to Europe’s last wild rivers, but demand for hydroelectric power is threatening these precious ecosystems. This marks the first time that a person from Bosnia and Herzegovina receives the Goldman Environmental Prize.
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan began relying on coal-based rather than nuclear energy. Kimiko Hirata’s decade-long campaign has stopped 13 new coal power plants from being built throughout the country. These would have released over 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes. Therefore, Hirata’s efforts have avoided emissions equivalent to those of 7.5 million cars a year, for forty years.
In September 2019, Sharon Lavigne, a special education teacher and climate justice advocate, succeeded in stopping the construction of an enormous plastic production plant in Mississippi, in the state of Louisiana. Lavigne mounted an opposition campaign, raised awareness in her community and organised peaceful protests to protect the right of her fellow citizens, especially African-Americans. The plant would have led to the release of huge amounts of toxic waste in an area where pollution is already destroying many lives.
Liz Chicaje Churay, Peru, South and Central America
Thanks to Liz Chicaje Churay and her supporters, in January 2018 the Peruvian government created Yaguas National Park, which protects 800,000 hectares of the Amazon rainforest. The park is key to conserving local biodiversity as well as safeguarding thousands of unique species, carbon-rich peatlands and protecting indigenous peoples.
Carey Mulligan on Syria, playwright James Graham on the Troubles … the Imperial War Museums’ new podcast brings celebrities and experts together to understand recent armed struggles
Comedian and author Deborah Frances-White is sitting at a table, in the shadow of a Spitfire which soars above her head. She is being interrogated on everything she knows about one of the most violent conflicts in recent decades. What comes to mind when she thinks of the Yugoslav wars? “I think of words like Milošević, Serbo-Croatia, Bosnia … I think there’s a star on the flag?” she flounders. “I remember there was a Time magazine cover with a man at the end of the war.”
Frances-White is in the hot seat because she is a guest on Conflict of Interest, a new podcast from the Imperial War Museums (IWM) – the Spitfire above her head is hung from the ceiling of its London museum’s atrium, and her interrogator is Carl Warner, the IWM’s head of narrative and curatorial.
I think about all the things I don’t know, all the time, and I feel very ashamed
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic presented one of his nation’s highest decorations to controversial Nobel literature laureate Peter Handke despite the anger of many people in the Western Balkans. At a May 9 ceremony in Belgrade, Serbia’s Karadjordje Star was awarded to the 78-year-old Austrian writer who is seen by many as an apologist for Serb war crimes and a staunch supporter of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
The United States and Europe have expressed support for the territorial borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which have been called into question in a document that has circulated among EU officials.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the Security Council on May 4 that the U.S. position on the 1995 Dayton peace accords and Bosnia-Herzegovina’s future as “a single state destined for the Euro-Atlantic community” remains unchanged.
Ireland and Estonia, which are nonpermanent members of the Security Council, joined France in affirming their “unwavering support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Bosnia.
The statements follow reports that a document has circulated among EU officials proposing the redrawing of borders in the Western Balkans to merge Kosovo with Albania and to incorporate parts of Bosnia into Serbia and Croatia to help the region’s EU integration.
A Slovenian news website last month published the document, allegedly sent to the EU by Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa. Jansa denied handing the document to European Council President Charles Michel.
EU and U.S. officials rejected the idea of redrawing borders in the Western Balkans after reports about the document were published.
Thomas-Greenfield on May 4 also told the Security Council that the United States supports “the essential role” of UN envoy Valentin Inzko in monitoring and supporting the implementation of civilian aspects of the Dayton accords.
But Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN renewed Moscow’s attacks on Inzko.
“He presents the situation as if the Bosnian Serbs and the Croats alone were to blame for all the difficulties,” said Anna Evstigneeva.
She also denounced his “interference” and “manipulation of historical events,” and demanded he not be involved with Bosnia’s relations with the European Union and NATO.
Inzko said he regretted the verbal attacks, including being labeled a monster by Milorad Dodik, Bosnia’s nationalist Serb leader.
PODGORICA — The European Union’s Neighborhood and Enlargement Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi is on a three-day visit to the Western Balkans to formally deliver EU-funded coronavirus vaccines.
Countries of the region aim to join the 27-nation bloc, but Serbia and other Balkan nations have been turning to China and Russia for much-needed shots as EU member states faced their own vaccination delays. Some politicians in the Balkans have criticized the EU for not coming to the rescue of their countries when help was needed the most.
“We care about Montenegro, we care about the Western Balkans and we care about our friends, the people of Montenegro,” Varhelyi said in a speech delivered during a brief stay in Montenegro’s capital, Podgorica, on May 4.
He started his regional trip in Serbia on May 3, followed by stops in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and North Macedonia on May 4. He will travel to Albania and Kosovo the next day.
Last month, the European Commission announced that a total of 651,000 Pfizer-BioNTech doses would be delivered to these countries in weekly instalments until August.
While most of the Western Balkan countries have struggled to get coronavirus vaccines, Serbia has launched a successful inoculation campaign mainly thanks to millions of doses of Russia-developed Sputnik V and China’s Sinopharm vaccines, which so far have not received the green light from the EU’s drug regulator.
Montenegro is to receive 42,000 Pfizer vaccines from the EU, following a delivery from China of 200,000 Sinopharm doses that enabled health authorities to launch their mass immunization program on May 4.
Bosnia-Herzegovina and other nations in the region heavily relied on the World Health Organization’s COVAX sharing scheme that distributes vaccine to less developed nations.
But deliveries were significantly delayed among shortages of the shots and some Balkan countries have been struggling to purchase COVID-19 vaccines directly from manufacturers.
The vaccines supplied by the EU to the region come on top of those provided by COVAX, of which the European bloc is one of the top contributors.
“Together with COVAX we are delivering almost a million doses to the Western Balkans, and this is the beginning,” Varhelyi said in Podgorica, according to a transcript of his speech posted on the European Commission’s website.
“We do hope that as more vaccines come into Europe we would be able to convince more and more Member States to share their available dosses with the Western Balkans.”
The first shipment of Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines donated by the European Union to Bosnia-Herzegovina arrived at Sarajevo International Airport on May 4. The delivery of more than 10,000 doses came via EU member state Austria, which is coordinating the EU4Health program’s vaccine distribution in the Western Balkans.
The European Union and the United States have rejected the idea of redrawing borders in the Western Balkans in response to an unofficial proposal to break up Bosnia-Herzegovina and merge Kosovo with Albania.
A document that has circulated among EU officials proposes incorporating parts of Bosnia into Serbia and Croatia to help the region’s EU integration, according to Reuters, which said it had seen the document but could not verify its authenticity.
“We are absolutely not in favor of any changes in borders,” European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer told a news conference.
The United States also rejected the proposal, warning that moving the borders risked exacerbating tensions in the region.
“Recent unwarranted speculation about changing borders in the Balkans along ethnic lines risks fostering instability in the region and evokes memories of past tensions,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement quoted by Reuters.
In an interview last week with a U.S. think tank, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic referred to a document proposing “the unification of Kosovo and Albania” and “joining a larger part of the [Bosnian] Republika Srpska territory with Serbia.”
Vucic dismissed the idea, saying his government was “not interested in creating any kind of Greater Serbia.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas last week also rejected the proposal, saying the idea had been “put back into a drawer.”
The discussion has alarmed Bosnia, which sees it as a threat to its territorial unity two decades after ethnic conflicts led to war in the region.
Two former Yugoslav republics, Croatia and Slovenia, have joined the EU. Montenegro, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo hope to accede. The EU says they must first settle conflicts and advance democratic reforms.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said separately on April 26 after talks with Vucic in Brussels that the EU wants to “continue to see positive developments in rule of law” in Serbia as part of accession talks.
The two discussed Belgrade’s talks with Kosovo, whose independence is not recognized by Serbia and several EU countries.
Von der Leyen said the bloc would support the construction of a railway between Belgrade and North Macedonia, which saw its hopes to formally start membership negotiations dashed last year after a veto from Bulgaria.
The leaders of North Macedonia and Kosovo are also due in Brussels this week.
Citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina over the age of 75 began receiving vaccines against COVID-19 in Sarajevo as the capital city started its immunization drive on April 21. Out of some 25,000 people in the eligible age category, around 7,500 have so far registered for a shot.
European Union member Austria said on April 20 that it plans to send 651,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to six countries in the Western Balkans by August as part of an EU scheme to provide assistance to neighboring countries and Africa.
Vienna said that this first distribution of doses may be followed by others.
The European Commission in January announced plans for a vaccine-sharing mechanism, with Austria serving as the mechanism’s coordinator for the Western Balkans.
Among the six Western Balkans countries, Serbia has one of the highest vaccination rates in Europe.
But the other five — Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo have had less success. The shortage of vaccines has even led to street protests in Bosnia.
“With this initiative we are showing that we are not leaving the region behind,” Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg told a news conference.
Schallenberg, whose government faces growing public frustration with the slow pace of vaccinations in his own country, said the doses will not be taken away from Austria’s quota.
“There is absolutely no connection here to the provision of vaccines in Austria and in other (EU) member states,” he said.
“These doses are not from a national quota. These are vaccine doses that the EU explicitly secured from the beginning for the purpose of passing them on to partners.”
Schallenberg said the vaccines will be distributed from early next month based on which countries need them most.
Bosnia will get the biggest share with 214,000 doses, followed by Albania with 145,000, and North Macedonia with 119,000. Serbia is last with 36,000.
Several dozen protesters marched, honked car horns, and rallied in Sarajevo on April 17, calling on the country’s parliament to remove the government, which they accuse of poor management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Organizers of the protest — called “Fight For Life” — accuse the cabinet of being responsible for delays in the procurement of vaccines. Activists also called for mandatory PCR tests upon entry into the country.
Its provenance was unexpected, the underlying motives unclear, and its seriousness questioned.
But a public squabble born of Slovenian indelicacy rippled through the Bosnian and EU capitals this week and raised uncomfortable questions about the durability of borders and institutions in the Balkans, particularly Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Slovenian President Borut Pahor reportedly broached the possible “dissolution” of Bosnia-Herzegovina in conversation with Bosnia’s tripartite presidency last month, and unconfirmed reports this week cited a phantom “non-paper” by Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa echoing talk of possible border changes to address lingering malaise in the former Yugoslavia.
Both leaders publicly dismissed suggestions that they were advocating or agitating for such an outcome.
But the alarm was duly raised and, strategic or not, the flap has unsettled outsiders to whom tinkering with decades-old borders is anathema and who think reforms are the best way to lift ethnically fraught Bosnia out of political paralysis.
“The idea of border changes is dangerous,” Florian Bieber, director of the Center for Southeast European Studies at Austria’s University of Graz, said.
He cited particular peril in the Balkans, where Serbian and Kosovar leaders were rumored to have considered a possible land swap three years ago. But he also warned of an unintended spillover into places like Ukraine, where Russia annexed Crimea seven years ago and still supports armed separatists.
“It was already highly risky [to] discuss a mutually agreed border change between Kosovo and Serbia and [is] even more risky in Bosnia because it would involve not only a nonconsensual process [but] affect people against their will and throw overboard the approach of the international community [that has been in place] since 1991, namely that no border changes along ethnic lines are acceptable,” Bieber said. “This would have knock-on effects in Crimea and elsewhere and could trigger renewed conflict in Bosnia.”
Out In The Open?
A local Slovenian news portal first reported on April 11 that Pahor had asked Bosnia’s co-presidents at a March 5 meeting whether “separating peacefully” was an option for Bosnia, which is still governed as a Bosniak and Croat federation along with a Serb-majority entity called Republika Srpska.
The complicated arrangement and labyrinthian levels of government were codified in the Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian War in 1995.
Bosniak Zeljko Komsic said a day later that the question had been put to him and the other two members of Bosnia’s presidency at a meeting in March.
Pahor’s office later confirmed that he had asked the Bosnian leaders about “ideas about the dissolution of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the redrawing of borders in the Western Balkans” during a visit to Sarajevo in early March “out of concern about these ideas.”
Reports suggested that Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the presidency and leader of Republika Srpska who recently intensified his calls for secession from the rest of Bosnia, responded more warmly to the Slovenian idea than his Bosniak and Croat counterparts.
Then came whirlwind reports this week suggesting that Jansa personally delivered a “non-paper” earlier this year to European Council President Charles Michel in which possible border changes were mentioned.
Jansa, a politically pugnacious ally of Hungarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has denied writing any such “non-paper.”
An EU official responded on behalf of Michel’s office on April 12 by saying that “we cannot confirm that we have received” such a document.
Bosnian border police along the Drina River in Zvornik, Bosnia
In it, under the heading “Western Balkans — A Way Forward,” Jansa proposes “solutions” that included “the unification of Kosovo and Albania” and “joining a larger part of the Republika Srpska territory with Serbia.”
It proposes special status “following the model of South Tyrol” — the mainly German-speaking province in northern Italy — for “the Serbian part of Kosovo.”
It also suggests either “joining the predominantly Croatian cantons of Bosnia-Herzegovina with Croatia, or…granting special status to the Croatian part of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
Bosniaks, it reasons, “will thus gain an independently functioning state and assume responsibility for it.”
It goes on to say that, after EU preparations for stabilization and other programs, “silent procedures” that are already “under way” include running the plans by “decision-makers in the region” and “decision-makers in the international community.”
Pressure For Change
Bosnia-Herzegovina has faced near-constant problems of governance since its creation with the two ethnic-based entities and locally governed Brcko district leaving the country with a highly constrained, weak central government.
But unresolved issues — including the problem of Bosnia’s ongoing political instability and stagnation when it comes to reforms — dominated conversation around the 25th anniversary of the Dayton accords in December.
Last month, Croatia’s Foreign Ministry was quoted saying Zagreb was “the driver” of an initiative earlier this year to draft a “non-paper” to highlight Bosnia “as an important issue for the European Union which should be more visible on the geopolitical space in Southeast Europe.”
WATCH: Peace, But No Prosperity: Bosnia Marks 25 Years Since Dayton Accords
EU institutions and member states occasionally share confidential but unofficial “non-papers” as suggested talking points or possible frameworks for discussion of particularly fraught topics.
In the Croatian one, Foreign Minister Gordan Grlic-Radman advocated EU candidate status for Bosnia, including for its effect to improve the beleaguered country’s “fragmented political landscape and atmosphere of mistrust” that exists among Bosnia’s political representatives.
Slovenia was among the other signatories, as were Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Hungary.
Grlic-Radman said after a meeting of EU foreign ministers on March 22 that other European counterparts — including from France and Germany — had also expressed support for the document.
It said Bosnia must reform its electoral legislation before next year’s general election.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month appealed to Bosnia’s tripartite presidency to work toward at least modest reforms, including “limited constitutional change…to reform the electoral system.”
He reportedly cited EU membership goals and “rulings of the European courts,” a reference to a 2009 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision demanding that Bosnia allow a minority outside the three main ethnicities — Bosniak, Croat, and Serb — to run for high office, an act that is currently banned.
It was the first official communication to Bosnia from U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration and, while delicately worded, sent an unmistakable signal to Sarajevo.
“There’s a whole bunch of things that are happening right now,” Toby Vogel, a policy analyst focused on the Western Balkans and senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council (DPC), told RFE/RL prior to the leak of Jansa’s purported “non-paper.”
“And I think it makes a lot of people nervous, not just Bosnians but others as well who fear that the incumbent ethnic elite [in Bosnia] might be seeking to sort of cement or solidify their stranglehold over politics, society, and the economy and preempt any challenge to their rule,” he said.
In that sense, Vogel added, the main ethnic parties that were essentially enshrined in the Bosnian Constitution that emerged from Dayton “absolutely have a congruence of interest.”
Then came the confusing barrage of diplomatic signals from Slovenia.
Perhaps they are simply seeking political points by appearing to offer solutions to the lingering instability among fellow former Yugoslav republics to the southeast.
Some analysts speculate that the Slovenian leaders could also be channeling dissatisfaction with Bosnia among “bigger actors” within the European Union.
Mateusz Seroka, a research fellow at the Center for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Warsaw, told RFE/RL he thinks border adjustments are a nonstarter — “such an option would cause as many problems as it could theoretically solve.”
But speaking before the “non-paper’s” contents were leaked, he said “there are still groups which could embrace thinking about partitioning the Western Balkan region along ethnic lines,” and doesn’t necessarily fault Ljubljana for raising the topic.
“Of course serious politicians should take into account that things could go in [the] wrong direction, so they should talk about various scenarios with their counterparts from the region,” Seroka said. “But it does not necessarily mean that they are in favor of, for example, the partitioning of existing countries.”
Policy analyst Vogel said he doubts the reported talk of Balkan border changes by Slovenian officials is a thoughtful strategic push.
“I think it’s more of a trial balloon or a provocation maybe,” he said. “But the question is, what’s the secondary effect this is going to have? Independently of whether any of this will actually happen, I think the effect it has is to create an atmosphere in which people feel that everything is negotiable — nothing is to be taken for granted. And that’s a very dangerous game to play, I think, in the Balkans.”
Several thousand people blocked traffic in front of the Serbian parliament on April 10 in a protest against the lack of government action to prevent pollution by heavy industry. Serbia is ranked among Europe’s most polluted countries and its reliance on coal for heating and electricity has had a devastating effect on its air quality. Protesters, who came to Belgrade from all over Serbia, held banners reading “Cut corruption and crime, not forests,” and “Young people are leaving because they cannot breathe.” The protest called “Eco Uprising” was also attended by green activists from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro who emphasized the importance of unity across the Balkans.
Amnesty International says some measures to tackle the coronavirus pandemic have aggravated existing patterns of abuses and inequalities in Europe and Central Asia, where a number of governments used the crisis “as a smokescreen for power grabs, clampdowns on freedoms, and a pretext to ignore human rights obligations.”
Government responses to COVID-19 “exposed the human cost of social exclusion, inequality, and state overreach,” the London-based watchdog said in its annual report released on April 7.
According to the report, The State of the World’s Human Rights, close to half of all countries in the region have imposed states of emergency related to COVID-19, with governments restricting rights such as freedom of movement, expression, and peaceful assembly.
The enforcement of lockdowns and other public health measures “disproportionately” hit marginalized individuals and groups who were targeted with violence, identity checks, quarantines, and fines.
Roma and people on the move, including refugees and asylum seekers, were placed under discriminatory “forced quarantines” in Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Serbia, and Slovakia.
Law enforcement officials unlawfully used force along with other violations in Belgium, France, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Romania, and Spain.
In Azerbaijan, arrests on politically motivated charges intensified “under the pretext” of containing the pandemic.
In countries where freedoms were already severely circumscribed, last year saw further restrictions.
Russian authorities “moved beyond organizations, stigmatizing individuals also as ‘foreign agents’ and clamped down further on single person pickets.”
Meanwhile, authorities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan adopted or proposed new restrictive laws on assembly.
Belarusian police responded to mass protests triggered by allegations of election fraud with “massive and unprecedented violence, torture and other ill-treatment.”
“Independent voices were brutally suppressed as arbitrary arrests, politically motivated prosecutions and other reprisals escalated against opposition candidates and their supporters, political and civil society activists and independent media,” the report said.
Across the region, governments in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan “misused existing and new legislation to curtail freedom of expression.”
Governments also took insufficient measures to protect journalists and whistle-blowers, including health workers, and sometimes targeted those who criticized government responses to the pandemic. This was the case in Albania, Armenia, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
In Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, medical workers “did not dare speak out against already egregious freedom of expression restrictions.”
Erosion Of Judicial Independence
Amnesty International said that governments in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere continued to take steps in 2020 that eroded the independence of the judiciary. This included disciplining judges or interfering with their appointment for demonstrating independence, criticizing the authorities, or passing judgments that went against the wishes of the government.
In Russia and in “much” of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, violations of the right to a fair trial remained “widespread” and the authorities cited the pandemic to deny detainees meetings with lawyers and prohibit public observation of trials.
In Belarus, “all semblance of adherence to the right to a fair trial and accountability was eroded.”
“Not only were killings and torture of peaceful protesters not investigated, but authorities made every effort to halt or obstruct attempts by victims of violations to file complaints against perpetrators,” the report said.
Human Rights In Conflict Zones
According to Amnesty International, conflicts in countries that made up the former Soviet Union continued to “hold back” human development and regional cooperation.
In Georgia, Russia and the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia continued to restrict freedom of movement with the rest of the county, including through the further installation of physical barriers.
The de facto authorities in Moldova’s breakaway Transdniester region introduced restrictions on travel from government-controlled territory, which affected medical provisions to the local population.
And in eastern Ukraine, both Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists also imposed restrictions on travel across the contact line, with scores of people suffering lack of access to health care, pensions, and workplaces.
Last fall’s armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan resulted in more than 5,000 deaths and saw all sides using cluster munitions banned under international humanitarian law, as well as heavy explosive weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated civilian areas.
Both Azerbaijani and Armenian forces also “committed war crimes including extrajudicial execution, torture of captives and desecration of corpses of opposing forces.”
Shrinking of Human Rights Defenders’ Space
Amnesty International’s report said some governments in Europe and Central Asia further limited the space for human rights defenders and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through “restrictive laws and policies, and stigmatizing rhetoric.”
This “thinned the ranks of civil society through financial attrition, as funding streams from individuals, foundations, businesses and governments dried up as a consequence of COVID-19-related economic hardship.”
The Kazakh and Russian governments continued moves to silence NGOs through smear campaigns.
Authorities in Kazakhstan threatened over a dozen human rights NGOs with suspension based on alleged reporting violations around foreign income.
Peaceful protesters, human rights defenders, and civic and political activists in Russia faced arrests and prosecution.
In Kyrgyzstan, proposed amendments to NGO legislation created “onerous” financial reporting requirements, while “restrictive new NGO legislation was mooted” in Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, and Serbia.
The Council of Europe says states across the continent last year continued to make “progress” on implementing judgments from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) despite the coronavirus pandemic.
But it stressed that further efforts are needed to tackle issues such as ill-treatment or deaths caused by security forces and poor conditions of detention, as well as a “growing number of cases concerning abusive limitations on rights and freedoms.”
The assessment was part of the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers’ annual report for 2020 on the execution of ECHR judgments.
States with the highest total number of new cases last year were Russia (218), Turkey (103), and Ukraine (84), followed by Romania (78) and Hungary (61).
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These countries also had the highest number of pending cases at the end of 2020: Russia (1,789), Turkey (624), Ukraine (567), Romania (347), and Hungary (276).
The states over which the ECHR awarded the most “just satisfaction” to applicants were Romania ($43.9 million), Russia ($13.4 million), Italy ($6 million), Montenegro ($5.4 million), and Moldova ($4.9 million).
Council of Europe Secretary-General Marija Pejcinovic Buric said in a statement that the report shows that member states take their obligations to implement judgments from the Strasbourg-based court “very seriously, even in difficult circumstances.”
However, Buric noted that “many important judgments have been outstanding for several years and a small number of high-profile cases are not being resolved quickly enough.”
“Our member states have a duty to implement ECHR judgments promptly and fully. This is not a kind request — it is a binding requirement,” she insisted.
According to the report, 983 cases were closed by the Committee of Ministers in 2020, which marked the 70th anniversary of the European Convention on Human Rights, as a result of steps taken by the relevant member states.
At the end of the year, 5,233 cases had yet to be fully implemented by the member states involved — among the lowest counts since 2006.
The report states that 581 payments of “just satisfaction” to applicants, awarded by the ECHR, were made on time in 2020, while the Committee of Ministers was still awaiting confirmation of payment in 1,574 cases at the end of December.
Among the most significant cases that the committee was able to close in 2020 were three cases regarding abusive limitations of the rights to liberty and security in Azerbaijan, and a case concerning voting rights in local elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
But the report cautions there is “not a time for complacency” because “serious challenges continue to be raised in the context of the execution of many cases.”
It cited an interstate case opposing Georgia and Russia, a “larger number” of individual applications linked to post-conflict situations or unresolved conflicts, and “many long-standing systemic and structural problems” concerning in particular “ineffective investigations” into ill-treatment or death caused by security forces and poor conditions of detention.
Nearly all of the world’s national statistical snapshots this year will be skewed by distance working and learning, travel bans, and other household anomalies brought on by lockdowns in one of the most transformative global health crises in human history.
With COVID-19 still a serious threat, governments and census organizers face stark challenges that arise with the decennial tallies.
Data collection that began last week in England, Wales, and the Czech Republic is, for the first time, mostly electronic and online. Internet servers in the Czech Republic were briefly overwhelmed.
Russia is due to gather all of its data in April for the third national census under President Vladimir Putin, who will have overseen each of his country’s post-Soviet censuses — highlighting population decline fed partly by cronyism and denied opportunity.
The United States is still readying its 2020 census following a Supreme Court challenge over the counting of noncitizens and other delays, as well as concerns about deliberate disruption.
Meanwhile, in the Balkans, a handful of census efforts have been postponed indefinitely or placed on last-minute hold because questions of ethnicity and nationality remain especially sensitive since the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
After decades of steady emigration for aspiring EU states in the Western Balkans, statistical overviews that will shape public and private life for a generation are pivotal for populations with newly won sovereignty or recognition and sizable minorities that identify with a neighboring state.
Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is still governed under a structure set out by the international Dayton accords 25 years ago, is the exception because it managed to conduct a census in 2013.
A census taker (left) talks to an ethnic Albanian family from the Serbian village of Veliki Trnovac on the Serbia-Kosovo border during a census in April 2002.
Kosovo has already postponed its nationwide headcount until at least 2022 in the face of political paralysis and logistical obstacles at least partly stemming from COVID-19.
But from Belgrade to Podgorica to Skopje, three other former Yugoslav republics in a region synonymous with cultural and historical fragmentation are offering fresh reminders of how fraught a census can be.
North Macedonia in March began an initial phase of its census-taking for Macedonians abroad before abruptly postponing its scheduled April launch of data gathering until September.
Serbia and Montenegro outwardly hope to hold their censuses after postponements of their own, with the stakes high for political and ethnic reasons.
Each has treaded carefully amid potentially divisive cross-border political pronouncements with ethnic components that threaten to undermine confidence in representative government and infrastructure planning.
North Macedonia
Registering abroad had already begun in March for the census of North Macedonia, which comes just two years since the country was renamed to assuage the cultural and territorial concerns of neighboring Greece.
Counting within North Macedonia was scheduled to begin on April 1 and continue for three weeks.
But Prime Minister Zoran Zaev announced on March 29 after a meeting with the main opposition leader that they had agreed to delay the enumeration until September, citing a surge of coronavirus infections and a vaccine shortage.
It was an abrupt reversal for Zaev, who had recently demanded the census go ahead despite opposition complaints that the pandemic threatened its accuracy.
“Probably some countries can afford to postpone, but they have a census from 10 years ago and we haven’t had a census for almost 20 years,” Zaev said.
The lack of reliable census data, he said, puts institutions “in the position of working in a fog, in the unknown.”
One of the major questions Skopje’s census should answer is the ethnic makeup of the country, including its sizable ethnic Albanian population.
Officials conduct a census for homeless families in the village of Vizbegovo near Skopje on March 3. North Macedonia began a census of its diaspora, prisoners, the army, and the homeless one month before the official census was due to begin on April 1. It has now been postponed until September.
Ethnic Albanians are generally estimated to make up around one-quarter of North Macedonia’s 2.1 million people.
Some minority rights in North Macedonia, including the inclusion of official languages, are dependent on a group composing at least 20 percent of the local population.
There have already been notable calls from ethnic Albanians within North Macedonia’s opposition and in neighboring Kosovo for ethnic Albanians to make their mark on the tally.
Arber Ademi is a leading member of the junior coalition party in North Macedonia that represents ethnic Albanians, the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI). Ademi has already threatened to discount the results of the census if Albanians don’t reach the 20 percent mark.
In neighboring Kosovo, one of the first actions that Albin Kurti took after being elected prime minister this month was to appeal to ethnic Albanians in North Macedonia to participate in the census.
An Albanian nationalist, Kurti has led the upstart Self-Determination (Vetevendosje) party to successive electoral upsets — in 2019 and again in February. Tens of thousands of diaspora ballots, in a country of under 2 million people that allows noncitizens of Kosovar descent to vote, were crucial to those victories.
“Since even with the current constitution, the political rights of the citizens in Northern Macedonia are dictated and derived from the numbers, the registration of every citizen is extremely important,” Kurti saidin a Facebook post.
“The registration of every citizen is extremely important,” Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti said in a Facebook post.
Aiming a statement at a neighboring country’s census might have seemed like a curious opening gambit for a prime minister.
But Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani did the same.
And the very next day, North Macedonia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Artan Grubi — an ethnic Albanian — went to Kosovo to seemingly urge further public participation.
Kurti’s main domestic opponent, Democratic Party of Kosovo acting Chairman Enver Hoxhaj, responded that North Macedonia’s census was more than “technical” but rather “a very important political process.”
We are not interfering in the [Montenegrin] census…but it’s important for us that the Serbian people don’t disappear and disappear.”
It was a clear riposte to Prime Minister Zaev’s attempt to assure minorities that “no one can challenge…acquired rights of minority peoples,” regardless of census results that he has downplayed as “a statistical operation for administrative needs and planning.”
Ethnic Albanians in North Macedonia must “prove through statistics that they are to the Balkans what the Germans are to Europe,” Hoxhaj said.
Sefer Selimi, founding head of the Democracy Lab, a nonprofit organization aimed at “strengthening democratic values” in North Macedonia and the Balkans, warned that opposition attacks on the census could undermine a crucial process that should lead to more sound government policies.
“These obstructions are influenced by nationalism and set us back at least 10 years,” Selimi told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service.
It is partly a result of making “the rights of one group of citizens dependent on their population,” he said.
Selimi cited a political narrative that has emerged portraying the opposition — and ethnic Albanians — as beholden to “extreme national movements” seeking to unfairly eclipse the “famous 20 percent” in an effort to get overrepresented.
Montenegro
In Montenegro, which declared independence from Serbia in 2006, a recently elected administration has already delayed a census scheduled for April to later this year.
But organizational obstacles, a lack of political consensus, and implied risks to Podgorica’s authority could imperil even that time frame.
Montenegro’s government was elected in August on a razor-thin margin and includes disparate groups with a Serbian nationalist grouping at its head for the first time in three decades.
The senior coalition alliance of Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapic, For The Future Of Montenegro, a pro-Serb and pro-Serbian Orthodox alliance, faces increasing pressure from junior allies to commit to a full four-year cabinet to replace the current government of technocrats.
Such a transition could expose political fissures, including with ethnic Albanian Deputy Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic and his Black On White bloc.
A woman walks past a billboard reading “Free Census 2011” in downtown Podgorica, Montenegro, in April 2011.
Meanwhile, because of their shared culture, religion, and history, many Montenegrins remain reluctant to shed the Serb identity. The resulting morass of national identity and politics is sure to affect any census campaign.
And the pressure, even from abroad, to assert minority presence is strong.
Belgrade has long sought to leverage Serb identity in Montenegro’s populace to reinforce its national presence in a splintered neighborhood and boost regional influence.
Even without the census, 2021 would be dynamic. With the census, we should expect heightened tensions and an aggressive campaign of both blocs.”
A billboard campaign during the last Montenegrin census, in 2011, showed Serbian tennis superstar Novak Djokovic encouraging respondents to “be what you are.” In the end, nearly 29 percent of those in Montenegro declared themselves Serbs in that count.
At least twice in the past 18 months, Serbian President Aleskandar Vucic has publicly stressed the importance of Serb participation in Montenegro’s census.
“We are not interfering in the census…but it’s important for us that the Serbian people don’t disappear and disappear,” Vucic said last May.
Months later, in August, he said it was essential “to keep Serb numbers up in Montenegro because then we can say that we succeeded in helping our people.”
Respondents to Montenegro’s census can skip questions about nationality, language, and religion. But doing so risks legislatively determined rights for minorities with significant representation.
“Even without the census, 2021 would be dynamic,” Daliborka Uljarevic, who heads the NGO Center for Civic Education in Podgorica, said recently. “With the census, we should expect heightened tensions and an aggressive campaign of both blocs.”
In February, Krivokapic further stirred the ethno-nationalist pot by backing a path to citizenship for people who have lived there for decades but hold foreign citizenship.
Krivokapic’s government is unlikely to muster the votes for such a change — if it is even permissible. But it struck a nerve in a country still scarred by the breakup of Yugoslavia and animated by its own declaration of sovereignty just 14 years ago.
Serbia
Back in Vucic’s own country, meanwhile, officials have already postponed census work from April to October, citing the obstacles to recruiting and training enumerators in a pandemic.
Serbia has lost hundreds of thousands of people to emigration since its last official count in 2011, with many complaining of political stagnation, corruption and state capture by Vucic and his allies, and a lack of economic opportunity.
The most serious challenges to its upcoming census might lie in convincing all sides of its credibility.
An opposition boycott of the rescheduled national elections in June 2020, during a reopening amid the pandemic, left Vucic’s Progressive Party with a supermajority that mostly excludes serious political oversight of the census process.
But officials will also have to overcome an ethnically fueled credibility problem.
An ethnic Albanian man rests near graffiti reading “Boycott of the census” in the southern Serbian city of Bujanovac in October 2011.
Around 6 million of Serbia’s roughly 7 million people declared themselves Serbs in the last census.
Minority groups included more than a quarter of a million ethnic Hungarians, followed by 150,000 or so Roma, nearly as many Bosniaks, and other much smaller contingents.
But many Bosniaks and ethnic Albanians boycotted the enumeration a decade ago, complaining that language and distribution of census takers were contributing to an undercount.
It is unclear whether this time will be any different.
Shaip Kamberi, a lawmaker for the Albanian Democratic Alternative-United Valley grouping, told RFE/RL that ethnic Albanian political representatives were still unsure and would wait to see how local elections were conducted in Presevo, in southern Serbia, on March 28.
“Our path to the boycott in 2011 was a consequence of the state not wanting to listen to our demands,” Kamberi said. “At this initial stage, we left it to the National Council of the Albanian national minority to establish contact with the [Serbian national] Bureau of Statistics and agree on terms.”
In addition to technical hurdles, Kamberi cited the de facto disenfranchisement of many ethnic Albanians forced out by violence in the late 1990s between Serbian forces and Kosovar independence fighters.
Decades later, he said, many are still in legal limbo despite being among the demands in a “Seven-Point Plan” lodged with the Serbian government in 2013.
Serbia’s Statistical Office told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service that they are cooperating with the official coordination body of national councils of minorities to identify key problems.
Meetings are scheduled with representatives of local self-government and with such national councils, the office said.
“We will certainly talk to everyone in order to remove any doubts about the census,” the office said. “It is in everyone’s interest to collect quality census data.”
The Czech Republic’s richest man, Petr Kellner, whose financial group has deep roots across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, has died in a helicopter crash in Alaska.
“With great sadness, PPF announces that on March 27, 2021, majority shareholder of PPF Mr. Petr Kellner tragically passed away in a helicopter accident in the Alaskan mountains,” the group said in a short statement on March 29.
It said that the crash, which claimed five lives, was under investigation. Alaska State Troopers said one survivor was listed in serious but stable condition.
U.S. media has reported that the accident occurred when the helicopter, which was taking the group on a heli-skiing excursion, crashed near the Knik Glacier in Alaska.
The 56-year-old Kellner, the world’s 68th-wealthiest person according to Forbes, died along with another guest of the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge, Benjamin Larochaix, also of the Czech Republic, two of the lodge’s guides, and the pilot of the helicopter, the reports said, citing officials.
Kellner, whose wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $17.5 billion, started his business selling copy machines and founded the PPF Group investment company with partners in 1991, two years after the fall of communism in the former Czechoslovakia, to take part in the country’s scheme to privatize state-owned firms.
Petr Kellner
PPF Group went on to grow in finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, media, and engineering in businesses spanning mainly Europe, Asia, and the United States. Its assets amounted to nearly $52 billion by mid-2020.
The group includes Home Credit International, the world’s largest nonbanking consumer lender with extensive activities on the Russian and Chinese markets.
PPF last year acquired the CME media group operating TV companies in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2018, it became the sole owner of Telenor’s telecommunications assets in Hungary, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia.
The group has donated millions of respirators and masks and thousands of coronavirus testing kits to help countries in the coronavirus pandemic, according to Czech media reports.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis offered his condolences to Kellner’s family, saying on Twitter: “Unbelievable tragedy. I am very sorry.”
Kellner’s daughter Anna Kellnerova, a two-time Czech junior equestrian show-jumping champion, said his funeral will be held “with only close family members.”
With reporting by The New York Times, AP, Reuters, and AFP
Almost 8,000 business owners and their employees from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and North Macedonia traveled to Belgrade and Nis in Serbia on March 27 to receive vaccinations against COVID-19. Some 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were secured by the Western Balkans Regional Investment Forum in cooperation with the Serbian government. Although Kosovo is also part of the forum, its Chamber of Commerce refused to participate.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic arrived in Sarejevo to donate 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the two constituent entities that make up the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Vucic was welcomed at the Bosnian capital’s airport on March 2 by members of the Bosnian presidency, Milorad Dodik and Sefik Dzaferovic.
The candidate of Bosnian Serb parties says he has won a repeat of local elections in the town of Srebrenica despite a boycott of the vote by Bosnian Muslims.
Mladen Grujicic declared victory in his mayoral reelection bid in the eastern town that was the scene of the Bosnian war’s worst atrocity when 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Serb forces in July 1995.
Elections in Srebrenica and Doboj, in the north of the country, were repeated after numerous irregularities had been reported in the November 2020 local elections, dominated by Bosnian Serbs.
Grujicic told RFE/RL that “even if there had been no boycott by Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) parties,” the difference in the number of votes in his favor “would have been large” and he would have won reelection anyway.
Grujicic won the previous election in 2016, becoming the first Bosnian Serb to become mayor of Srebrenica since 1999.
In Doboj, where Bosnian Serbs make up about 70 percent of the population, incumbent Boris Jerinic of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) also declared a “convincing” victory.
The SNSD said Jerinic won almost 70 percent of the vote.
In a news conference at midnight, Bosnia’s Central Election Commission confirmed Grujicic and Jerinic’s victories.
The turnout was almost 43 percent in Srebrenica and more than 55 percent in Doboj, the election commission announced.
The results of the February 21 repeat elections were almost certain to be challenged and exacerbate already high political tensions in the area.
Bosnian Muslims vowed to boycott the rerun in Srebrenica because, they said, officials haven’t done enough to rectify the problems that marred first elections in November 2020 such as multiple voting and the discovery of caches of pre-marked ballots before voting began.
Moreover, the Bosniak parties complained, officials weren’t including mail-in voters in the new elections.
Bosnia comprises two entities, the Muslim and Croat federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska.
Srebrenica is regarded by some as a potential flashpoint for ethnic tensions because of the massacre, the worst mass killing in post-World War II Europe.
The massacre was labeled as genocide by international courts, but Serbian and Bosnian Serb officials refuse to accept that wording.
The episode came at the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian War pitting the Serbs against Bosniaks and Croats that claimed some 100,000 lives.
The country continues to struggle domestically and internationally under an ethnically based deal — known as the Dayton Agreement — that ended fighting among the sides.
Reports from eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina suggest that many Bosniaks boycotted a repeat election in the city of Srebrenica on February 21 after local authorities claimed fraud in November voting.
The results were almost certain to be challenged and exacerbate already high political tensions in the area.
Ethnic Serbs dominated the balloting in November. But Bosnia’s Central Election Commission concluded that irregularities like multiple voting and caches of pre-marked ballots before voting began had compromised its legitimacy.
Bosnian Muslims had vowed to boycott the rerun in Srebrenica because, they said, officials hadn’t done enough to rectify the problems.
Moreover, the Bosniak parties complained, officials weren’t including mail-in ballots in the new election. Many diaspora Bosnians were unable to vote in November after mail-in ballots were distributed late.
They vowed to appeal to Bosnia’s Constitutional Court to contest the new voting.
“We expect the BiH Constitutional Court to uphold our appeal, which would allow all Bosniaks from Srebrenica to vote, wherever they may be,” Sadik Ahmetovic, president of an initiative uniting Bosniak parties called Moja Adresa (My Address), told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service. “In this respect, we expect new elections to be called in which every citizen of Srebrenica would have the right to choose their [preferred] candidates. That’s the only way the elections in Srebrenica will be legitimate and democratic.”
Bosnia comprises two entities: the Muslim and Croat federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska.
Srebrenica is regarded by some as a potential flashpoint for ethnic tensions because it is the scene of the massacre of around 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces late in the Bosnian War in an act that has been ruled a genocide.
The country continues to struggle domestically and internationally under an ethnically based deal that ended fighting among the sides in 1995.
A rerun of the November voting was also being held in the northern city of Doboj in February 21.
WASHINGTON — The United States needs to step up its engagement with the Western Balkans if it wants to counter Chinese and Russian influence in the region, the former president of Croatia said.
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who served as president of the Balkan nation from 2015-20, also criticized Europe for dragging its feet on regional integration.
“If you want to really prevent others from political interference in a certain area, then you have to be involved yourself,” Grabar-Kitarovic said, referring to the United States, during a discussion hosted on February 17 by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“I must say that I’ve been disappointed by the sort of [lack of interest] that I’ve seen in the past years” in the Balkan region from the administrations of both President Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama, she said.
Washington and Brussels have been seeking to integrate the nations of the Western Balkans into the European Union and NATO to bring stability to a region rocked by ethnic fighting in the 1990s.
However, Grabar-Kitarovic said the process has been “too slow” and that “it’s creating a vacuum that is being filled by third forces that are not necessarily benevolent at all times,” a possible reference to China and Russia.
The United States and EU have expressed concerns over investments by Beijing in the Western Balkans as well as Kremlin disinformation and political influence activities in the region.
As an example, Grabar-Kitarovic called the decision to invite Bosnia-Herzegovina into NATO’s Partnership for Peace program rather than directly into the military alliance “an unnecessary delay” that opens the door for adversaries to claim that the region isn’t “good enough” for Western organizations.
The former president highlighted the importance of Bosnia’s stability to Croatia’s own security. Bosnia, which borders Croatia, is threatened with secessionist movements.
Grabar-Kitarovic said the Chinese are taking a “very smart” approach in their relations with the Western Balkans.
“They show that they value you, that they will talk to you,” she said, pointing out that a Croatian leader hasn’t had a White House meeting since 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
“The feeling that we are all getting…is if you are not a big country, or if you are not a problem country, or if you are not bringing big money to the table, you don’t have an entrance to the White House,” she said.
She said Washington has been “dragging its feet” on a double-taxation treaty with the country that would improve trade, and that she could not remember the last time a company from the United States made a big investment in Croatia.
“What I would like to see is more U.S. engagement, and a lot more active role” in the region, she said.
The United States has promised to invest up to $1 billion into the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund, which seeks to back projects that help the 12 EU nations located between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas improve their transport, energy, and digital infrastructure connections.
Grabar-Kitarovic, along with Polish President Andrzej Duda, launched the Three Seas Initiative in 2015.
WASHINGTON — The United States needs to step up its engagement with the Western Balkans if it wants to counter Chinese and Russian influence in the region, the former president of Croatia said.
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who served as president of the Balkan nation from 2015-20, also criticized Europe for dragging its feet on regional integration.
“If you want to really prevent others from political interference in a certain area, then you have to be involved yourself,” Grabar-Kitarovic said, referring to the United States, during a discussion hosted on February 17 by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“I must say that I’ve been disappointed by the sort of [lack of interest] that I’ve seen in the past years” in the Balkan region from the administrations of both President Donald Trump and predecessor Barack Obama, she said.
Washington and Brussels have been seeking to integrate the nations of the Western Balkans into the European Union and NATO to bring stability to a region rocked by ethnic fighting in the 1990s.
However, Grabar-Kitarovic said the process has been “too slow” and that “it’s creating a vacuum that is being filled by third forces that are not necessarily benevolent at all times,” a possible reference to China and Russia.
The United States and EU have expressed concerns over investments by Beijing in the Western Balkans as well as Kremlin disinformation and political influence activities in the region.
As an example, Grabar-Kitarovic called the decision to invite Bosnia-Herzegovina into NATO’s Partnership for Peace program rather than directly into the military alliance “an unnecessary delay” that opens the door for adversaries to claim that the region isn’t “good enough” for Western organizations.
The former president highlighted the importance of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s stability to Croatia’s own security. Bosnia-Herzegovina, which borders Croatia, is threatened with secessionist movements.
Grabar-Kitarovic said the Chinese are taking a “very smart” approach in their relations with the Western Balkans.
“They show that they value you, that they will talk to you,” she said, pointing out that a Croatian leader hasn’t had a White House meeting since 2006, when George W. Bush was president.
“The feeling that we are all getting…is if you are not a big country, or if you are not a problem country, or if you are not bringing big money to the table, you don’t have an entrance to the White House,” she said.
She said Washington has been “dragging its feet” on a double-taxation treaty with the country that would improve trade, and that she could not remember the last time a company from the United States made a big investment in Croatia.
“What I would like to see is more U.S. engagement, and a lot more active role” in the region, she said.
The United States has promised to invest up to $1 billion into the Three Seas Initiative Investment Fund, which seeks to back projects that help the 12 EU nations located between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas improve their transport, energy, and digital infrastructure connections.
Grabar-Kitarovic, along with Polish President Andrzej Duda, launched the Three Seas Initiative in 2015.
As countries in Europe struggle with shortages of COVID-19 vaccines, China has stepped up its efforts in the Western Balkans, supplying injections and collecting diplomatic wins in the region.
Serbia has emerged as the tip of the spear for China’s “vaccine diplomacy” in Europe, where Beijing is aiming to build global influence by sending its injections to poorer countries — filling a vacuum left by Western countries who have bought all of the available doses and are facing production delays for their homegrown vaccines.
During the pandemic, he has not held back in trumpeting his country’s strong ties with Beijing — holding several high-profile press events to praise China’s assistance and famously kissing the Chinese flag in March after medical aid from China arrived in Belgrade.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (without mask) welcomes Chinese health experts and a planeload of Chinese medical supplies to Belgrade on March 21, 2020.
Vucic’s strategy appears to have worked, as Belgrade has leveraged its relations amid the pandemic to diversify its vaccine sources and inject a greater percentage of its population than any other country in continental Europe. As of February 16, Serbia had given at least the first vaccination to about 11.2 percent of its nearly 7 million people, outpacing the EU, which is led by Denmark, with 6.9 percent of its population having received its first shot.
The bulk of those doses — some 1.5 million — have come from China’s state-backed Sinopharm, though Serbia is also using Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and the U.S.-German Pfizer-BioNTech injection.
The latest Sinopharm vaccine shipment arrived on February 11 at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport and was welcomed by Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic and Chinese Ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo.
For China, providing vaccines to Serbia serves as an important geopolitical win as it faces stronger headwinds from an increasingly skeptical and disapproving West. Belgrade also becomes an important launching pad for China to gain a foothold in Europe as Beijing seeks greater influence in the region and beyond.
“Serbia has long been a testing ground for China,” Vuk Vuksanovic, a researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy and a former Serbian diplomat, told RFE/RL. “We’ve seen it with defense, construction, technology, and now with vaccines. It’s where Beijing has tried policies that it hopes to test elsewhere in Europe.”
From Masks To Vaccines
For China, the supply of vaccines follows a similar logic to Beijing’s so-called “mask diplomacy.”
That strategy saw it provide much needed masks and medical equipment to countries along China’s Belt and Road Initiative — from Africa to Southeast Asia and the Middle East — in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic to deflect anger and criticism over Beijing’s handling of the outbreak and to enhance its soft power.
In Serbia, the Chinese vaccines have helped the country become an inoculation leader. Good access to injections has also provided Vucic with a useful foil to criticize the EU and the inequalities in global access to vaccines.
In late January, Vucic compared the global scramble for vaccines with the Titanic disaster. “The world has hit an iceberg, like the Titanic: the rich and the richest only save themselves and their loved ones,” Vucic said. “[The EU countries] have prepared expensive lifeboats for them and those of us who aren’t rich, who are small, like the countries of the Western Balkans — we’re drowning together in the Titanic.”
“For China, it’s a golden opportunity to embarrass the EU and the West more broadly,” Dimitar Bechev, a fellow at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna, told RFE/RL. “This is a chance for Beijing to burnish its global reputation and further its campaign to replace the West as the backbone of international cooperation.”
The EU pledged to give the six prospective EU members in the Western Balkans — including Serbia — $85 million to buy vaccines, but deliveries have been delayed.
The powerful bloc, which buys vaccines on behalf of its 27 member states, has not yet approved the Russian and Chinese injections, even though the manufacturers of the three vaccines being produced in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom are struggling to deliver their promised doses to countries.
Instead of waiting for EU help, Belgrade moved to get doses from China, Russia, and the United States directly — a strategy that other countries may be looking to follow.
Beijing was quick to offer support to Serbia after it declared a state of emergency in March after finding itself cut off from access to medical equipment due to EU export restrictions. In what was the first rendition of his recent criticism of the vaccines, Vucic called European solidarity “a fairy tale” and emphasized that only China was willing to offer Serbia a helping hand.
North Macedonia is currently seeking to buy 200,000 Sinopharm doses in the hope of inoculating its population quickly.
Bosnia-Herzegovina has received 2,000 doses of Russia’s Sputnik V, with plans for 200,000 more to arrive in the next month. Montenegro is also expecting 100,000 doses of the Russian vaccines — a significant number for its tiny 625,000 population.
“Those countries outside the EU are left in the cold and have no other choice,” Bechev said.
Workers unload containers holding 500,000 doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccine from a special Air Serbia flight at Belgrade’s airport on February 10.
At least one EU country, Hungary, is following Serbia’s example by procuring Chinese and Russian vaccines. Budapest unilaterally approved the Sinopharm injection for emergency use on January 29 and has ordered 5 million doses, the first of which arrived on February 16.
Others may also take the same approach.
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has expressed an openness to follow the embrace by Hungary and Serbia of Chinese, Russian, and Western vaccines — visiting Budapest and Belgrade on February 5 and February 10, respectively, to meet with leaders and discuss their strategies.
Pandemic Politics
Serbia’s growing success in its vaccine strategy is a product of a foreign policy that has looked east and west, which was on full display in the vaccine preferences made by members of the Serbian government.
Prime Minister Brnabic received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine while Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin and parliament speaker Ivica Dacic took Sputnik V. Not to leave anyone out, Health Minister Zlatibor Loncar posed for his shot of China’s Sinopharm. Vucic has also indicated that he would likely roll up his sleeve for the Chinese injection.
But despite the clear overtones, the Serbian government has insisted its vaccine strategy is not driven by world politics but rather is focused on rolling back a public health emergency.
“For us, vaccination is not a geopolitical matter. It is a health-care issue,” Brnabic told the BBC in a February 10 interview.
According to Vuksanovic from the Belgrade Center for Security Policy, Serbia’s embrace of China’s vaccine diplomacy should be seen in the context of the country’s wider foreign policy balancing act. “It is also a way to provoke and leverage the EU to do more,” he said. “The China factor is an important way to extract as much as you can from Beijing, but also to potentially motivate the Europeans to do more.”
Following Vucic’s criticism of European solidarity and praise for China in March for its “mask diplomacy,” the EU eventually stepped up and delivered medical equipment to Serbia as part of a $112 million aid package.
But Beijing’s strategy appears to be making gains: Surveys show that China is viewed overwhelmingly positively in the country, showing that its diplomatic efforts during the pandemic have been fruitful.
The larger question for China is whether it can build upon its foothold in Serbia and make gains elsewhere in Europe.
Despite being chaired by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the meeting received the lowest level of representation since it was founded in 2012 — with six European states not sending either a prime minister or a president.
Despite that mild show of disinterest in a major Beijing event, many countries in the region are looking to keep their ties with Beijing intact amid the uncertainty and gridlock in the EU over the vaccines.
“Even those countries in Eastern Europe who are becoming disillusioned with China still might keep their China card around to play depending on how things shake out,” Vuksanovic said.
An advocacy group says that homophobic language and hate speech against transgender people is on the rise among European politicians and has warned about a backlash against the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people across the continent.
The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association said in its annual report published on February 16 that politicians in 17 countries in Europe and Central Asia have verbally attacked LGBT people over the past year.
The report highlighted Poland, where nationalist politicians from the ruling right-wing PiS party have criticized “LGBT ideology” during election campaigns. It also singled out Hungary, where transgender people last year were banned from legally changing gender.
The situation for LGBT people in Bulgaria and Romania could worsen this year, while in Turkey, ruling-party politicians have repeatedly attacked LGBT people, Evelyne Paradis, the association’s executive director, warned.
The trend of politicians verbally attacking LGBT people has also been on the rise in countries such as Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Moldova, North Macedonia, and Russia, the report said.
In Belarus and Ukraine, some religious leaders have blamed LGBT people for the coronavirus pandemic. Hate speech on social media has grown in Montenegro, Russia, and Turkey, in traditional media in Ukraine, and is an ongoing issue in Georgia, North Macedonia, and Romania, the group said.
“There’s growing hate speech specifically targeting trans people and that is being reported more and more across the region….We have grave concerns that it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Paradis said.
In Central Asia, LGBT rights are stagnating or backsliding in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the report said, adding that in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, “we see windows of opportunity for advancing LGBT rights.”
The group said the pandemic has caused difficulties for some young LGBT people at home with homophobic families during lockdowns and given openings to politicians who attack gay and trans people as a way to shift attention from economic problems.
“LGBT communities are amongst the groups that get scapegoated in particular,” said Paradis.
