Drop Srebrenica resolution: Ivanic
BANJA LUKA, Bosnia, June 29, (Agencies): A top Bosnian Serb politician urged the United Nations on Monday to abandon plans for a British-drafted resolution on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, saying its adoption by the world body would only deepen ethnic divisions in Bosnia.
Britain has drafted the resolution at the UN Security Council to mark next month’s 20th anniversary of the killing of around 8,000 Muslims in Bosnia, aiming to encourage reconciliation among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks.
But the draft, mentioning genocide at Srebrenica, has only angered Bosnian Serbs and Serbia, who branded it as “anti-Serb”. Serbia has already sent a protest letter against the resolution to the United Nations.
“Nearly half of Bosnia’s citizens are against this resolution and I ... request that it is not adopted at the United Nations,” Mladen Ivanic, the Serb chairman of Bosnia’s tripartite inter-ethnic presidency, said in a letter to the Security Council.
Heaven
On July 11, 1995, towards the end of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, Bosnian Serb forces swept into the eastern Srebrenica enclave, a UNdesignated “safe heaven”. There they took 8,000 Muslim men and boys and executed them in the days that followed, dumping their bodies into pits in the surrounding forests.
The Serbs acknowledge that a “grave crime” took place at Srebrenica but reject the genocide label, while the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has ruled that the massacre — the worst mass killing on European soil since World War Two — constituted genocide.
“There is full unity of Serbs in Bosnia that this resolution is antiSerb,” Ivanic said. “Thus its possible adoption will not have positive effects but will additionally divide the Bosnian society.”
Ivanic, who is seen as a moderate politician, said he had sent the letter in his own name because the presidency’s Serb, Muslim Bosniak and Croat members could not agree on the issue.
Local media reported on Monday that Russia, a traditional ally of Orthodox Serbs, had filed a counterresolution on Srebrenica at the Security Council in an apparent attempt to thwart the British resolution.
Arrest
Political quarrels over the resolution followed the recent arrest in Switzerland of Srebrenica’s Muslim wartime commander, Naser Oric, on a warrant issued by Serbia, which again stirred ethnic tensions in the region.
Twenty years after the war, Bosnia remains a fragile state reliant on external aid, with economy hobbled by a complex and unwieldy power-sharing system and persistent tensions between its two constituent regions, the MuslimCroat Federation and the Serb Republic.
Meanwhile, less than two weeks before the Srebrenica massacre’s 20th anniversary, Muslims and Eastern Orthodox Serbs in the Bosnian town are as divided as ever.
Serbs put up anti-European Union posters on Sunday with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s portrait on them and the words “Eastern alternative” and “Republika Srpska,” or “Serb Republic.” Most of them were plastered on the bullet-riddled walls of a warehouse in the nearby village of Kravica, where Serb forces executed Muslim Bosnians during the 1995 genocide.
Bosnia’s Muslims want the country to join the EU, while Serbs would like their half — called Republika Srpska — to secede and stay close to Russia as an independent country.
Muslims in Srebrenica are outraged by the posters and believe the postwar division of Bosnia is a product of genocide.
“I am hurt and disappointed,” said Sabra Mujic, 50, who lost her husband in the massacre. She said the posters are taking Srebrenica backward.
NATO air raids against the Serbs stopped the 1992-95 Bosnian war shortly after more than 8,000 Muslim Bosnians from Srebrenica were killed in Europe’s worse massacre since the Holocaust.
More than 100,000 people died during the Bosnian war. The Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the war, divided the country into two political entities, one for the Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats, and the other for the Christian Orthodox Serbs.