Montenegro marks its first year of independence

0 Comments | AFP, May, 2007

PODGORICA (AFP) — Tiny Montenegro marks its first anniversary as a sovereign state on Monday, but as divisions over its separation from its former partner Serbia remain deep, not everybody is celebrating.

Home to some 650,000 people, Montenegro, wedged between the mountains and the Adriatic Sea, voted in a historic referendum last May to break from Serbia, thus becoming the newest world state.

Until May 2006, Serbia and Montenegro were the only two former Yugoslav republics that had stayed together after Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia all went their own way in the early 1990s in a series of bloody wars.

"Montenegro's statehood has been justified in many ways during the past year and has opened up real European perspectives for the country," Dragan...