Bosnia Herzegovina

SARAJEVO, Nov 18 (Reuters) - The European Union must seal its external borders to deter migrants who are no longer welcome in the wealthy 27-member bloc, Interior Minister Ales Hojs of Slovenia, which currently presides over the EU, said on Thursday.

Speaking at an international conference on migration in Sarajevo, Hojs said European interior ministers had been preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, a migrant crisis which he said was hybrid war waged by Belarus against the EU's eastern borders, and the fall of the government in Afghanistan.

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia Nov 11 (Reuters) - Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, whose secessionist ideas are widely seen as endangering a Bosnian peace deal, said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday that no political goals were worth the sacrificing of peace in Bosnia.

"I am not ready to sacrifice peace for anything," said Dodik, who is the Serb member of Bosnia's tripartite inter-ethnic presidency. "I am not ready to sacrifice peace for a fight for Republika Srpska."

SARAJEVO, Nov 2 (Reuters) - The U.S.-sponsored peace deal that ended war in Bosnia in the 1990s is at risk of unravelling unless the international community takes measures to stop Serb separatists, a peace envoy warned in a report to the United Nations seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

In his first report in the capacity of the international community's High Representative in Bosnia, German politician Christian Schmidt said that Bosnia was facing the greatest threat to its existence since the war.

"The prospects for further division and conflict are very real," Schmidt wrote.

SARAJEVO, Oct 28 (Reuters) - The European Union's top military official voiced support for the unified Bosnian armed forces on Thursday, after Serb leader Milorad Dodik had threatened to pull the Serb component out of the forces and form an exclusively Serb army within Bosnia.

The formation of the country's joint armed forces (OSBiH), incorporating Serb, Croat and Bosniak components that fought each other in a 1990s war, has been praised as the greatest achievement since the conflict, in which about 100,000 died.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Hospitals across Bosnia are again filling with COVID-19 patients gasping for air, and the country’s pandemic death toll is rising. Yet vaccination sites are mostly empty and unused coronavirus vaccines are fast approaching their expiration dates.

When the European Union launched its mass vaccination campaign, non-member Bosnia struggled along with most other Balkan nations to get supplies. By late spring, however, hundreds of thousands of doses started pouring into the country.

SARAJEVO, July 14 (Reuters) - Bosnian police on Wednesday arrested the country's intelligence chief on accusations of money laundering and abusing his office to forge university diplomas, police and prosecutors said.

Osman Mehmedagic, the head of the Intelligence-Security Agency (OSA), was arrested at the request of state prosecutors and police were conducting activities accordingly, Sarajevo police spokesman Mirza Hadziabdic told Reuters.

11 July 2021; MEMO: Turkey on Sunday marked the 26th anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, in which over 8,000 Bosnian civilians were brutally killed by Serbian forces.

Vice President Fuat Oktay on Twitter quoted the statement of Alija Izetbegovic, independent Bosnia's first president: "Whatever you do, don't forget the genocide. Because the forgotten genocide is repeated."

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Fikret Grabovica wants to see at least some remorse from wartime Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic when U.N. judges deliver their final verdict for genocide and other war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1990s ethnic carnage.

Grabovica’s 11-year-old daughter, Irma, was among the 10,000 civilians killed in the relentless shelling and sniping that Serb troops under Mladic inflicted on the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — A Bosnian court on Monday sentenced the Balkan country’s former security minister to six months in prison for corruption.

The Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina on Monday ruled that Sadik Ahmetovic abused his position for illegal financial gains at cost to the state budget.

The case is related to project agreements for the ministry from 2011 and 2012 that were worth some 7,000 euros ($8,500.)

SARAJEVO, April 26 (Xinhua) -- Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) can learn a great deal from China, said members of BiH's Parliamentary Assembly after a video meeting with Chinese legislators on Monday.

"It was impressive what four of us heard during the presentation of our colleagues from China. Not only about the economy, but also about the timely and efficient response of the Chinese authorities to the pandemic," said Lazar Prodanovic, a member of the BiH Parliament's Friendship Group for Asia.