SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Angelina Jolie’s movie about the Bosnian war brought back harsh and powerful memories on Thursday at a screening in the city where many of the most brutal events of the 1992-95 conflict occurred.

“I am speechless, I feel sick,” Rukija Vrckalo, who survived 43 months of the siege of Sarajevo under constant bombardment, said as she left a cinema in the city where Jolie’s “In the Land of Blood and Honey” was shown one day before its U.S. premiere.

MOSTAR, Bosnia, Dec 22 (Reuters) – Bosnia’s sole
aluminium smelter, Aluminij Mostar, will post a small profit
this year and expects a loss in 2012 due to lower prices on the
world market, General Manager Ivo Bradvica said on Thursday.

“The profit will not be high and I can only say that we
shall end the year positively,” Bradvica told a year-end news
conference in the southern town of Mostar. “We forecast a loss
for next year.”

SARAJEVO, Dec 22 (Reuters) – Eighteen months from now,
Marko Damjanovic will practically be able to reach out and touch
the European Union from his farm on Bosnia’s northern border
with Croatia.

But he’ll no longer be able to sell his eggs there.

“I feel like I could explode,” he said. “It looks like I’ll
have no other solution but to shut up shop.”

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – The economic crisis in Europe could see economic growth in Bosnia slide to just 0.7 percent next year, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday, slashing its growth forecast from 3 percent previously.

It also cut its 2011 forecast for the ex-Yugoslav republic to 1.7 percent, from 2.2 percent.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Imams across Bosnia issued a rare joint message during prayers on Friday condemning violence in the name of Islam, a week after an extremist attack on the U.S. embassy shook the country’s overwhelmingly moderate Muslim community.

The assault by an Islamist gunman has revived questions over the threat from radical Islam in the Balkans.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – A suspected radical Islamist fired on the U.S. embassy in the center of the Bosnian capital with an assault rifle on Friday in an attack that lasted 30 minutes.

A police officer was seriously wounded and shop workers scrambled for cover in Sarajevo’s busy city center until a police sniper wounded the gunman and he was arrested. Several bullets struck the outside wall of the compound.

SARAJEVO, Oct 11 (Reuters) – Bosnia’s two bourses, which
have struggled to survive, expect trade volumes and profits to
rise this year thanks to the auction of government treasury
bills and commercial securities, officials said on Tuesday.

Divided along ethnic lines into two autonomous regions,
Bosnia has two operating bourses — the larger Sarajevo Stock
Exchange (SASE) and the smaller but more developed Banja Luka
Stock Exchange (BLSE).

SARAJEVO, Oct 7 (Reuters) – Bosnian soccer fans and
officials say a bitter political crisis between Serbs, Croats
and Muslims is stoking tension that saw rival fans fighting in
the capital Sarajevo on Thursday.

Soccer violence in Yugoslavia presaged the wars that tore
the country apart in the early 1990s, most notoriously in the
Croatian capital Zagreb in 1990 when rioting erupted between
fans of Dinamo Zagreb and Belgrade’s Red Star.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Hopes for a quick government in Bosnia were hardly high when rival ethnic nationalists polled strongly in an election last October.

But a year on — and with Serbs, Croats and Muslims still deadlocked — the Balkan country risks further disintegration, cut off from international funding and paralysed between opposing visions of its future.

SARAJEVO, Sept 23 (Reuters) – Bosnia’s banks have returned
to profit in the first half of this year following cost-cutting
measures and a steadying in the level of provisions against bad
debt, officials said on Friday.

“The banks posted a profit of 83 million Bosnian marka ($57
million), which is a modest result compared to a capital
investment of 2.5 billion marka but far better than the last
year,” said Mijo Misic, secretary general of Bosnia’s banking
association.