Calls for justice mark anniversary of 1995 massacre

SREBRENICA, BosniaHerzegovina — Dozens of world leaders on Saturday joined survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia to remember the victims of the only crime in Europe since World War II that has been declared a genocide.

Most international speakers urged tolerance and reconciliation in Bosnia, still ethnically divided 25 years since the brutal execution in July 1995 of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.

But the Bosniak Muslim member of the country’s tripartite presidency, Sefik Dzaferovic went further, urging the world to demand Serb leaders finally accept responsibility.

“I am calling on our friends from around the world to show not just with words but also with actions that they will not accept the denial of genocide and celebration of its perpetrators,” he said.

“The Srebrenica genocide is being denied (by Serb leaders) just as systematically and meticulously as it was executed in 1995. We owe it not just to Srebrenica, but to humanity, to oppose that,” he added.

On Saturday, the recently identified remains of nine victims were reburied in a memorial cemetery just outside the city in eastern Bosnia.

The Srebrenica massacre is the only episode of Bosnia’s 199295 war to be defined as genocide, including by two U.N. courts. But leaders in neighboring Serbia still deny the extent of the massacre and refuse to acknowledge they amounted to a genocide.

Dozens of world leaders, including Canadian Prime

Minister Justin Trudeau and Spain’s Pedro Sanchez, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Britain’s Prince Charles, addressed the commemoration ceremony held Saturday, before the funeral, via prerecorded video messages.

Typically, thousands of visitors attend the commemoration service and funeral, but this year only a relatively small number of survivors were allowed at the cemetery due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Bosnian Serb wartime political leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, were both convicted of and sentenced for genocide in Srebrenica by a special U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. In all, the tribunal and courts in the

Balkans have sentenced close to 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officials to more than 700 years in prison for Srebrenica killings.

The Bosnian war pitted the country’s three main ethnic factions — Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims — against each other after the breakup of Yugoslavia. More than 100,000 people were killed in the conflict.

Kemal Softic / Associated Press A woman kisses a gravestone near Srebrenica. The recently identified remains of nine Bosniak Muslim victims of the 1995 genocide were reburied in a memorial cemetery just outside the city.