Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

US photographers Ron Haviv and Christopher Morris presented some of the most important of their images from the break-up of Yugoslavia in Zagreb on Tuesday evening, with Haviv saying that he went to the Balkan war zone in the 1990s to "witness history" for himself.

Senior presidential, government and municipal officials, as well as representatives of war veterans, laid flowers on Friday in front of the monument dubbed 'Mother's Broken Wing' in central Skopje in memory of the 54 young Macedonians who lost their lives amid the collapse of the federal Yugoslav state.

The Humanitarian Law Centre NGO said in a report published on Wednesday that in the summer of 1995, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs forcibly mobilised around 10,000 refugees and took them back to territories under the control of the Bosnian Serb Army in Bosnia and the rebel Serb-run Army of the Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia.

"Ethnicity should not be a constitutional category," she adds. "I won't identify with any of these groups out of principle."

A federation of six republics, the former Yugoslavia brought together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Macedonians Montenegrins and others under one socialist union, but it fell apart in a series of brutal wars in the 1990s.

The states that once formed part of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s experienced war, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and humanitarian disaster. Economic growth was slow or negative and corruption was the rule, not the exception. The outflow of refugees was much greater than the migration of young people out of the Balkans today.

Bosnians gathered in front of the Croatian embassy in Sarajevo on Monday, protesting over possible plans being mulled by neighbouring Croatia to build a landfill site for radioactive waste at Trgovska Gora, near the border with Bosnia.

The Croatian Veterans' Affairs Ministry and local authorities in the towns of Daruvar, Petrinja, Sinj and Sibenik signed agreements on Monday to set up new centres for people who fought in the 1991-95 war.

The centres in the four towns will provide care and assistance, basic physical rehabilitation and sporting, recreational and educational activities for Croatian veterans.

Velika Gorica County Court decided on Wednesday to reduce the life sentence handed down in Munich in Germany to former Yugoslav State Security Service official Zdravko Mustac to 40 years in jail.

The court cited the fact that Croatia's criminal code does not include life imprisonment and prescribes a maximum jail term of 40 years.

This was based on a notification sent by the government of that country to all members of the United Nations on the change of the name.

Despite having generated intense confrontation between political parties and painful division in Greek society, the name deal between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was ultimately endorsed by Parliament. The international community hailed Athens's institutional move, similar to the way it had welcomed the constitutional revision in Skopje.