Today, we commemorate the millions of victims of Nazi persecution. We solemnly reflect on the massacre of nearly one third of the Jewish people and countless other minorities. We gather here today, united by a common responsibility, to never allow those who suffered atrocious acts of discrimination, deprivation, cruelty, and murder, fade in vain with the sands of time.

Bulgaria's Rumiana Jeleva has withdrawn her bid to become EU Commissioner and has stepped down from her post as foreign minister after EU Parliament members accused her of incompetence in a hearing last week.

Leaders of the former Yugoslavia traded hostile invective that recalled the wars of the 1990s today after Croatia's president threatened armed intervention to halt any Serbian attempts to partition Bosnia.

He had stolen 14 years of his sentence! Already! Today he is 64 and has already stolen additional few days of his trial. First, his capture was protracted, and now we wait for his trial to begin... The ICTY is very careful to avoid any possible complaint about possibly hurting his "rights"? But, in reality, we all know, his case is like pedestal on which the killed beast is exposed to show to the village that the danger has gone. But has it? Europe does not want to realize that the trial of Karadzic is to a degree a trial of itself. Europe has difficulty to even pronounce term GENOCIDE in Srebrenica; likewise it is not happy to repeat the term HOLOCAUST.

The trial of Radovan Karadzic, the former self-proclaimed president of Republika Srpska, started on October 26, 2009. The trial is in session without the presence of Radovan Karadzic. He has been indicted on multiple counts of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against Muslims and non-Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during the war of aggression from 1992 to 1995. He was, in addition to a number of other allegations, responsible for the 44-month siege of Sarajevo and the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995 where more than 8.000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed. The siege of Sarajevo left at least 10,000 people dead of whom 85% were civilians.

The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, edited by Professor Richard Bosworth, was published by Oxford University Press last month. It is a multi-authored volume with sections on the origins and legacies of fascism, Italian Fascism, the Nazi-Fascist comparison and fascism outside of Italy and Germany. The latter section has chapters by different authors on different countries, from Spain to Japan, and includes a chapter on Yugoslavia and its successor states. This chapter traces the history of ultranationalist, fascist and far-right phenomena, from Serbia's ‘Black Hand' and Croatia's ‘Pure Party of Right', through the World War II quisling regimes of Milan Nedic and Ante Pavelic, up to the regimes of Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman and Radovan Karadzic in the 1990s.