One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.Twenty six years later, long after his death in 1898 Bismarck was proven correct. The trigger event for World War I was the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, on 28 June 1914.
This region, with its three or more religions, two alphabets, and at least three languages, continues to be a tinderbox where violence is never far away. Now Al Jazeera, the Qatari news service, has decided to offer news in the region in the most common local language, Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian.
Al Jazeera's news service is likely to cause trouble in this volatile region, as an article in The Weekly Standard notes. The biggest group of Islamic people in the region speak Albanian and therefore will not be listeners.
