News stories by Vesna Peric Zimonjic, page 5

The month of March, named after the Roman god of war, Mars, appears to be the favourite among war planners in modern times.

Only months ago, most of the Serbs would probably not know that Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay, as there is hardly anything that connects the two nations.

Anti-European Union (EU) sentiment is growing across the Balkan countries that have proclaimed membership in the European family of nations as their highest political goal during the past decade. It is caused by prolonged economic hardships that still bite hard, failure of authorities to fight widespread corruption and political deadlock in creating stable governments.

A long-running joke in Serbia goes that the country’s most successful export products are berries, grains, maize, and world-renowned tennis players like Novak Djokovic and Jelena Jankovic.

Mila looks like the thousands of teenage girls who visit the newly-opened, glamorous shopping mall in downtown Sarajevo. She’s discreetly dressed in black trousers and jacket, with carefully manicured fingernails. The 19-year- old’s name means 'sweet' or 'kind'. The name is in harmony with her enchanting smile.

It takes little to bring out the scars that many women who were raped in Bosnia still carry. Rumours, later shown to be unfounded, that Angelina Jolie would star in a film to be shot in Sarajevo on the war-time love between a Serb man and a Bosniak Muslim girl he raped, had women's groups lodging strong protests.

For a while it looked like the start of a ride in a time machine. Serbian engineers, their caps bearing the emblems of the defunct Yugoslav Railways, cheered on the first train of the new Slovenian-Croatian-Serbian railway.

Serbia is preparing to go before the United Nations next month to renew negotiations over the future of Kosovo, its southern breakaway province that has declared independence and been recognised by a number of countries.

It's not often that the leading Belgrade daily Politika devotes two of its four foreign pages to the praise of one nation, but it did so for the visit of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month.

It's been quite a while since Mevliha Cebo enjoyed the job she was educated for: a pre-school teacher in her native Sarajevo.