In 1999 United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote: “Through error, misjudgement and an inability to recognise the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder”.
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Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs do not deny the crime, but do not refer to them as genocide. They also knew Mladic had told the Bosnian Serb assembly, “My concern is to have them vanish completely”, and that [Bosnian Serb leader Radovan] Karadžic pledged “blood up to the knees” if his army took Srebrenica.
Historian Cedomir Antic believes Belgrade’s position is “understandable”.
These divisions were entrenched by a peace deal that split Bosnia into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb-run Republika Srpska, autonomous “entities” linked by weak state institutions in the national capital, Sarajevo.
Most Muslims and Croats want Bosnia to join the European Union, but many Bosnian Serbs favour ties with Russian Federation and are deeply suspicious of Brussels’s push to strengthen Bosnia’s unity by reducing the autonomy of its two “entities”.
But for global legal expert Tibor Varadi the case is closed.
The panel will include: the Honorable Stephen Rapp, US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, head of the Office of Global Criminal Justice at the US Department of State; Ambassador Kurt Volker, Executive Director of the McCain Institute for worldwide Leadership and ex- Ambassador to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; Professor Daniel Serwer, Johns Hopkins University, director of the Conflict Management Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced worldwide Studies (SAIS); and Tanya Domi, professor at Columbia University’s School of worldwide and Public Affairs and an affiliate faculty member of the Harriman Institute.
“The global Court concluded in 2006 that Serbia had not committed genocide in Srebrenica and nothing can change that fact”, he said.
The Dewsbury event is one of many which will happen around Yorkshire. The prime minister will host a reception in Downing Street for the Bosnian president, Bakir Izetbegovic, and representatives from the Mothers of Srebrenica, a group for those who lost relatives in the massacre.
Vucic has said in the past that Serbs respected the “pain and suffering of others and even understand the hatred towards us from those who went through the hell of Srebrenica”.
Vucic has also refused to call the massacre genocide.
“Something is awakening in the consciousness of the Serbian people”.
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The Serbian government at its emergency session late Tuesday reiterated its rejection of the British United Nations resolution, but decided Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic would attend Srebrenica memorial ceremonies in a show of readiness to honor the victims and put the war past behind.
