SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnian police arrested 25 people on Wednesday on suspicion of multiple murders, drug-trafficking and robbery in what it described as the largest crackdown on organized crime since the country’s 1992-95 war.

Organized crime in the western Balkans grew out of the wars that tore apart socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s, leaving the region awash with weapons and a key transit route for drugs and other illicit goods trafficked from Asia to western Europe.

SREBRENICA, Bosnia (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned world powers on Thursday not to repeat in Syria the mistakes they made in Bosnia, during a landmark visit to Srebrenica where U.N. peacekeepers failed to prevent the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The United Nations had designated the enclave in eastern Bosnia a “safe haven” for Muslim refugees, but peacekeepers stood by helplessly as Bosnian Serb forces carried out the slaughter in 1995.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on world powers on Wednesday to urgently unite to end the bloodshed in Syria, recalling the inertia of the United Nations in 1995 as genocide occurred in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

Wrapping up a week-long tour of the countries carved from old federal Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Ban told the Bosnian parliament he was making a plea to the world.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnia and the International Monetary Fund have reached agreement on a new two-year $500 million standby loan that would be used to plug budget holes and pay off debt maturing next year, an IMF official told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

The country’s two autonomous regions, the Serb Republic and the Federation dominated by Muslims and Croats, are running high budget deficits this year and urgently need cash to cover their respective gaps.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Three men accused of attacking the U.S. embassy in Bosnia were ordered out of court as their trial began on Friday after they refused to stand when judges entered, saying they obeyed only God’s law.

Mevlid Jasarevic, 23, fired on the U.S. embassy in downtown Sarajevo for 50 minutes with an automatic rifle last October, seriously wounding one police officer before a sniper injured him and he was arrested.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Four former Bosnian Serb soldiers were handed the longest jail terms yet by the Sarajevo war crimes court on Friday for their role in the mass execution of hundreds of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica during Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two.

The men were jailed for up to 43 years each for crimes against humanity for their part in the 1995 killings of about 800 men and boys at a farm during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – A Western envoy said on Wednesday he would suspend his authority over a disputed Bosnian district sandwiched between two feuding regions, in the latest attempt to slowly scale down international involvement in the strife-torn country.

After the Dayton peace accords ended Bosnia’s 1992-95 war and divided the country into the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat federation, both regions claimed Brcko.

SARAJEVO, May 18 (Reuters) – DIFC Investments, the
investment arm of the company running Dubai’s financial free
zones, has not sold software company SmartStream Technologies
but the process is under way, the chief executive of the
Investment Corporation of Dubai said on Friday.

“No deal has been made yet. It is in the middle of the
process,” Mohammed al-Shaibani told Reuters on Friday on the
sidelines of a business forum.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Twenty years after Ratko Mladic’s forces began raining artillery fire on Sarajevo, the former Serb general looked down again on the Bosnian capital’s main square from a giant screen showing the start of his genocide trial live from The Hague.

Those who had survived a siege in which 10,000 died cursed the name of a man showing only defiance, not remorse.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Local elections will be held on October 7 across Bosnia but delayed in the southern town of Mostar, where rival Bosniak and Croat parties have failed to agree on how to elect local officials, the election chief said on Monday.

The October vote is expected to reveal whether, 16 years after the 1992-95 war, politics in the Balkan country has shifted from focusing on nationalist issues to more mundane everyday problems such as the economy.