Next thing you know, the queen will be calling Roksanda Ilincic to ask if she can whip up something special for a big event.
Just a decade ago, Serbia joining the European Union would have been unthinkable. But today, EU officials — and Serbs themselves — say that allowing the former pariah state into the exclusive bloc could bring benefits to both.
The Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal sentenced the former chief of the Yugoslav army to 27 years imprisonment Tuesday for providing crucial military aid to Bosnian Serb forces responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and for a deadly four-year campaign of shelling and sniping in Sarajevo.
Macedonia is 20 years old, if you're talking about the former Yugoslav republic. Or it's thousands of years old, if you're talking ancient history.
It was supposed to be a model for international justice and national reconciliation: a U.N.-backed tribunal to hold trials in one of the 20th century's grimmest chapters - the Khmer Rouge's murderous 1970s regime in Cambodia.
The only career foreign service officer to rise to the position of secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger was a straightforward diplomat whose exuberant style masked a hard-driving commitment to solving tangled foreign policy problems. Eagleburger, who died Saturday at age 80, held the job late in George H.W. Bush's presidency, culminating a distinguished diplomatic career.
While it is encouraging that Ratko Mladic will have to answer for his alleged crimes, there will never be true peace in the Balkans until all crimes committed against innocent civilians (regardless of ethnicity) are exposed and prosecuted ("Mladic found after 16 years on the lam," World, Friday).
It is a beautiful place with a tragic history. In 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated while riding in his carriage in the center of the town by a Serbian nationalist. This act was the spark that ignited World War I. It was a war without purpose that cost millions of lives. Some 80 years later, another Serbian nationalist by the name of Ratko Mladic commanded the Serbian forces that not only killed many residents in Sarajevo, but he is said to have ordered the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica.
It is tragic that many Croatians and Croatian-Americans such as Jeffrey Kuhner seem unable to understand that the Serbs had and still have legitimate grievances against a Croatian state that has glorified and resurrected the symbolism and rhetoric of a shameful Nazi-puppet and genocidal past ("The coming Balkan war," Commentary, Wednesday).
