Serbia’s Prime Minister was forced to flee a ceremony held to mark 20 years since the Srebrenica massacre on Saturday, when mourners hurled stones and bottles at him in what his government later described as an attempted assassination.
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After condemning the “monstrous crime” committed in Srebrenica, Vucic traveled to a monument to the Bosnian victims to pay his respects, but crowds soon began began chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) and hurling stones, the Associated Press reported.
Aleksandar Vucic was one of several foreign dignitaries, including ex- U.S. President Bill Clinton, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Britain’s Princess Anne and Jordon’s Queen Noor, who attended the event at the Potocari memorial complex to remember the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, a crime later designated as genocide by worldwide courts.
In what has become annual ritual as more graves are discovered, the bones of newly identified victims will be interred beneath marble gravestones in the Potocari memorial cemetery. His guards rushed him through the mad crowd before pushing him inside an armored vehicle.
“I’m sorry that people didn’t acknowledge my honest intentions to build friendship between Serbs and Bosniaks”, he said.
Also, earlier this month Serbia hailed Russia’s veto of a draft United Nations resolution recognising the Srebrenica massacre as genocide.
A “deeply disappointed” Camil Durakovic, the Bosnian Muslim mayor of Srebrenica, issued a quick apology to Vucic for the mad outburst.
Two decades ago, columns of men and boys were shot in cold blood along dirt roads and in forested valleys around the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Vucic’s presence at the event was supposed to be seen as a sign of reconciliation.
These days, many Bosnian, Serb and Croat families co-exist in small villages and towns across eastern Bosnia’s idyllic countryside, dotted with Serbian Orthodox Christian churches and Bosnian mosques.
In the Serbian capital, Belgrade, police ringed the parliament after Mr Vucic’s government banned a gathering of remembrance for Srebrenica’s dead.
While crowds strolled Saturday between obelisk-shaped grave markers covering the memorial site, some paused to read inscriptions or pray.
Resid Dervisevic, who survived the escape through the forests in 1995, said each year he takes part in the march and it hurts. Thousands more where killed as they fled into nearby forests.
“The world is still being dominated by wars and killings based on ethnicity and race and religion”.
“We were attacked from all sides”.
Serbia has acknowledged the massacre, but has refused to call it genocide.
Many Serbs dispute the term, the death toll and the official account of what went on – reflecting conflicting narratives of the Yugoslav wars that still feed political divisions and stifle progress toward integration with Western Europe.
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Vucic, once an ultra-nationalist, came to represent his country at the commemoration in an apparent gesture of reconciliation. According to the United Nations definition, that is a genocide and the worldwide Criminal Tribunal for the ex- Yugoslavia and worldwide Court of Justice have both labeled it as such.
