Issue 142 - June 13, 1994

Effectively, the talks about percentages and maps are only of temporary importance for both sides. If this ceasefire holds, and one shouldn't bet on it, both sides will emerge if not stronger then at least refreshed, the international community will have time to think of something, while Milosevic will get a chance to nail Radovan Karadzic.

In the possible conflict between Milosevic and Karadzic, unless the latter gives in, the Serbian opposition may side with the Bosnian Serb leader, and his prospects do not seem to be gloomy

Until recently it was the best guarded border in Europe. Now only Yugoslav border guards patrol the border. The pillboxes on the Albanian side with their sights pointing in Serbia's direction, are no longer an obstacle to smugglers and Albanian citizens who cross the border illegally. The number of armed incidents has increased. After Albania decided to cut the "oil pipeline" which led to Montenegro, the very busy traffic on this part of the border faces the threat of dying out. Even a diplomat recently had to pay a fine for smuggling petrol

The Serbs today, view the "Serbian cause" through the super dinar, i.e. through a healthy national currency, the bugbear of the creators of the first Memorandum, regardless of the fact whether the matter concerned economists or theoreticians of integral self-management, men like Mihajlo Markovic and Ljuba Tadic, for whom all evil in the otherwise idyllic Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began at the very mention of the word 'market'

Disregarding the fact that Tudjman cannot possibly be satisfied with the results of these visits and Kucan himself said that the talks were occasionally polemic, even tough, and concerning the current difficulties of the Croatian political life, Tudjman must have been relieved by the fact that the visit took place at all

Ending of the war in Bosnia Herzegovina by the division of this central republic of the former Yugoslavia with 51 per cent envisaged for the Moslems and Croats and 49 per cent for the Serbs, was officially announced in Geneva on May 13 after the meeting of the so-called contact-group for Bosnia Herzegovina.