Foreign Affairs chief Federica Mogherini is planned to represent the European Union at Saturday’s commemorations.
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The symbolic gesture would mark the 20th anniversary of the slaughter in neighboring Bosnia of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb troops the worst carnage in Europe since World War II. The Bosnian Serbs themselves coined the term “Etničko čišćenje” (ethnic cleansing) to define their strategy, which was publicly announced on 12 May 1992.
Russian Federation has saved Serbia from execution, Alexander Kravchenko said. Serb forces let the Dutch peacekeepers leave Srebrenica, but kept their weapons.
The British-drafted resolution urged that “Acceptance of the tragic events at Srebrenica as genocide is a prerequisite for reconciliation”. The oldest victim, Jusuf Smajlovic, was 75 when he was executed and he will be laid to rest together with his 29-year-old grandson, Hebib.
It stopped in front of Bosnia’s presidency where the weeping crowd tucked more flowers into the canvas or simply approached it to touch it or caress the canvas that was hiding the remains of the victims found in mass graves and identified through DNA analysis. Identification of the remains is still ongoing.
“They only found the legs of my younger son”. “I have never been interested in security assessments”, he said. It was her son’s fingerprint, the only physical memorial of his presence on this Earth. However, the materials of the worldwide Criminal Tribunal for the ex- Yugoslavia suggest that the Hague Tribunal listed 5,000 missing people as victims of the conflict. The task of delivering justice for the crimes of Srebrenica, especially for those directly responsible and for mid-level commanders, falls to the courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially the State Court, which has primary responsibility for trying war crimes in the country and has concluded more than 250 cases in the past decade.
About 12,000 participants of the March of Peace also arrived in Potocari on Friday. The path from Srebrenica to Tuzla is commonly known as “Death Way”.
The March of Peace participants are walking the reverse route, with Potocari as their last stop.
Tens of thousands of women and children were forcibly removed, with more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys killed. Only 3,500 of them survived.
The survivors have testified to the horrors they endured while walking through forests and mountainous terrain for days, saying they were forced to eat leaves, passed bodies and hallucinated as poisonous gases were thrown at them.
The Serbian minister specified that in the first half of 2015, authorities foiled 20,104 attempts at illegally crossing the border, which is about 800 percent more than in the same period previous year.
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Many in Serbia and the Srpska Republic – the Serb part of Bosnia – however still deny that the act was genocide and insist that there were fewer victims and that numerous men were killed in combat. That’s where I lost my brothers and my father.
