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Bosnia and Herzegovina

This Happened

This Happened — July 11: Srebrenica Massacre

The Srebrenica massacre happened on this day in 1995 during the Bosnian War. Bosnian Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladić, captured the town of Srebrenica, which was designated as a United Nations Safe Area. Bosnian Serb troops then systematically killed more than 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys in an act of ethnic cleansing.

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LGBTQ+ International: Spain’s Transgender Bill, Istanbul Pride Arrests — And The Week’s Other Top News

Welcome to Worldcrunch’s LGBTQ+ International. We bring you up-to-speed each week on the latest news on everything LGBTQ+ — a topic that you may follow closely at home, but can now see from different places and perspectives around the world. Discover the latest news from all corners of the planet. All in one smooth scroll!

Featuring, this week:

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In The Balkans, Russia Is Already Busy Rekindling The Ugly Past

Even with no end in sight to the war in Ukraine, Russia may be plotting to destabilize the Balkans by the end of this year. The target? Bosnia and Herzegovina, which may be already close to splitting.

The eyes of the world may be on Ukraine, but Russia may be also planning to destabilize the Balkans as early as this year. The Foreign Minister of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bisera Turković, warned that the plan for a breakaway Republika Srpska, one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, may start this autumn. Bosnia and Herzegovina was founded after the breakup of Yugoslavia 1992 after a referendum that was boycotted by the majority of Bosnian Serbs. Serbs are an overwhelming majority in Republika Srpska.

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Meet Benjamina Karic, Sarajevo's New Millennial Mayor

The very first memories of the 30-year-old mayor is when the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina was under siege. But now it's also time to move on.

SARAJEVO — Benjamina Karic makes a discreet entrance at Morica Han, Sarajevo's only remaining caravanserai, a type of roadside inn. The local filmmaker Danis Tanovic is currently shooting the final scene of his next film, "Deset u pola," and a technician turns on a fire hose to spray the actors with artificial rain. Having escaped the sprinkling, Karic chats for an hour with the actors and producers, seemingly amazed by this first film shoot in the city since the outbreak of coronavirus.

Karic never loses the radiant smile that has accompanied her since her election as mayor of Sarajevo. It was on April 8, her 30th birthday, becoming the youngest mayor in the the history of this iconic capital. "And only the second woman!" she adds. A third point of pride is that she was elected "unanimously" by all political parties of the 26-vote city council.

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Geopolitics
Alessio Perrone

Balkan Scars And A Secret Plan To Redraw The Borders Of Bosnia

The colored tattoo of a fortified bridge towering high over troubled waters takes up almost all of my friend Ivan's shoulder. In his early 30s, Ivan has a footballer's build and flawless cockney accent. He's been a British citizen almost all his life, but was born in Mostar, in present-day Bosnia, in the late 1980s — a bad time to be born in Bosnia..

He says he remembers the din of the bombs falling on his town when he was a kid and the Yugoslav Wars broke out, in 1992. Ethno-nationalist groups seceded from Yugoslavia and turned on each other. They fought prolonged, bloody conflicts that killed at least 140,000, and committed genocide on at least one occasion. In Srebrenica, Bosnia in 1995, pro-Serbian forces executed at least 8,000 Muslim Bosnian civilians. Ivan's family, ethnic Croatians, fled Mostar as refugees, resettling first in Germany, then in London.

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LA STAMPA
Emanuele Bompan and Marco Ranocchiari

Bosnia's 'Brave Women' And The Fight For Free-Flowing Rivers

In the Balkans, developers are rushing to install hydroelectric plants on Europe's last untapped river systems. Activists — including an unlikely group of Bosnian villagers — are fighting back.

KRUŠČICA — The country road that leads to Kruščica meanders through wooded hills, haystacks and scattered houses. It's a sleepy landscape, sometimes enlivened by the loud colors of the corrugated iron on a mosque roof or the bright red of apples in a roadside vendor's stall.

Nearby is a stream that bears the same as the village. Bosnia has a slew of formidable rivers. The thin Kruščica isn't one of them. And yet, many people here value its clean waters, so much so that for the past year-and-a-half, a group of activists has guarded — through rain and shine — what is now known as the "bridge of brave women." Their goal is to prevent the construction of two hydroelectric plants.

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food / travel
Bertrand Hauger

Sarajevo, Same Pigeons

Sarajevo's Baščaršija square is known as "Pigeon square." There are moments when the birds are everywhere. In this shot, you may have to look a bit harder to spot them.

Geopolitics
Sven Felix Kellerhoff

The Karadzic Verdict And The Meaning Of "Genocide"

BERLIN — What does "genocide" actually mean?

The United Nations War Crime Tribunal in The Hague has officially declared the massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995 as genocide. The term has a complicated back story, which is worth revisiting after Thursday's historic conclusion in The Hague in the case of Radovan Karadzic.

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blog

Pigeon Square

BašÄ�aršija square is one of the landmarks of Sarajevo's old town, where everybody comes to sit around and talk and drink. But we tourists know it as "the Pigeon Square".

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