Many women have told BIRN about violence, verbal abuse and negligence during childbirth in Central and Eastern Europe. But very few felt able to seek justice.
Croatian police arrested a former Bosnian Croat fighter and charged him with committing war crimes against two civilians in the north-eastern Bosnian town of Orasje in 1992.
A Turkish hacker group replaced the front page of the Serbian Finance Ministry’s Public Debt Administration website with a photograph of coffins and a slogan about the Srebrenica genocide.
Serb political leaders in both Serbia and Montenegro continue to deny that the 1995 Srebrenica massacres were genocide, reject international courts’ verdicts and accuse them of anti-Serb bias, opposing attempts to come to terms with the past.
Midhat Poturovic’s exhibition ‘Soul of Srebrenica’ opened on Saturday at the EndzioHub gallery in central Belgrade, unaffected by a small demonstration outside by supporters of jailed Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic.
As the UN court prepares to rule on whether the Serbian State Security Service chiefs Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic illegally controlled wartime paramilitary units, BIRN looks at how they were deployed in the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts.
The wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Sana Brigade, Branko Basara, is accused of attacking, forcibly relocating and murdering civilians in the Sanski Most area of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992.
Former Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic will hear the judgment in The Hague this week in their retrial for masterminding the most notorious Serb combat units that fought in the Croatian and Bosnian wars.
Records held by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia show how paramilitary units were set up and deployed to use violence to achieve political aims in the 1990s wars.