As Bosnia-Herzegovina prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of the killings, the remains of Srebrenica victims are still being found in mass graves.
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A few months before the end of the Bosnian war, Bosnian Serb forces under Gen. Ratko Mladic took over a United Nations “safe haven” in eastern Srebrenica, separated the men and boys from the women, bound their hands, led them to killing fields and shot them.
In total some 10,000 to 15,000 Muslim men and boys tried to escape on foot through the forests to Muslim-controlled territory in the hours before the Serbs arrived.
His contrition came a year after denying that a genocide was committed in Srebrenica, prompting outrage in the region and condemnation from Europe and the U.S.
An areal view of memorial center in Potocari near Srebrenica, 150 kms north east of Sarajevo, Bosnia, on Wednesday, July 8,2015.
The global Court of Justice ruled in 2007 that the massacre was genocide.
The resolution said that “acceptance of the tragic events at Srebrenica as genocide is a prerequisite for reconciliation”.
But the veto is being seen as part of Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to challenge and push back against the West, and the New York Times said it marked “a new low in relations among world powers”.
Russian Federation on Wednesday vetoed a draft United Nations (UN) resolution recognising the Srebrenica massacre as genocide, branding the measure “confrontational” and a setback to reconciliation in the Balkans.
“Genocide is a crime and those who committed it are criminals who should be punished as such”, British Ambassador Matthew Rycroft wrote in a letter to Mladen Ivanic, the Serb chairman of the Bosnian presidency.
Goati, the political analyst, said Serbia’s reaction to calling Srebrenica a genocide is characteristic of any people or individual accused of an atrocity. “Every year, in July, I have the same feeling again”. The phrase “ethnic cleansing” was coined by a United States diplomat during the early phases of the Bosnian tragedy to describe a then-Serbian policy to drive Bosnian Muslims out of their homes and villages.
A convoy carrying the coffins of 136 newly-identified Srebrenica victims left Thursday to head for the Bosnian town where the massacre took place for their burial on the 20th anniversary.
“Had this been the case with Sri Lanka in 2009, or now in Sudan, Burundi or even Myanmar, the consequences for the lives of millions of people would be vast”, he said. That agreement ended a war in which more than 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims. “The facts of the genocide in Srebrenica have been established by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pages of photographic evidence, witness testimony and the actual physical remains of more than 6,000 victims so far”.
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Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said after an emergency meeting of the government Tuesday night that the British resolution opened fresh divisions and “pushed us into the trenches of hatred”.
