Bosnian Serb leader denies scale of Srebrenica massacre

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August 14, 2018 5:50 PM

On Tuesday, Dodik, the ultra-nationalist president of Bosnia's Serb-run entity Republika Srpska (RS), urged MPs there to overturn the report, calling it "biased and untrue."

Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik on Tuesday called for a government report on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre to be annulled, in a provocative move that could raise ethnic tensions ahead of October elections.

Compiled by a previous government, the 2004 report marked Bosnian Serbs' first official acknowledgement of the scale of the massacre, in which some 8,000 Muslims were killed in the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II.

He has refused to describe the mass killing by Bosnian Serb forces as a genocide, despite two international courts ruling it as such.

Dodik said the report, which contained the names of 7,806 victims, "is not relevant, is very selective, untrue, unproved, biased, distorts facts, creating a fake picture about the events in and around Srebrenica," according to Bosnia's Fena news agency.

Dodik, who is running to be a member of Bosnia's central tripartite presidency in the October 7 elections, also called for "an international commission" to make "the final report on Srebrenica".

Bosnian Serbs have long downplayed the scale of the Srebrenica massacre, which saw Bosnian Serb forces summarily execute thousands of Muslim men and boys over several days.

Dodik previously called for the report to be revised when he was prime minister of RS in 2010, claiming it was made "under pressure" from the international community.

Bosnia's Prime Minister Denis Zvizdic condemned Dodik's latest request on Tuesday as a "pre-election move" aimed at diverting public attention away from other issues.

"No one, not a single institution in Bosnia could detract from the rulings of international courts," Zvizdic was quoted as saying by Fena.

In response to the RS parliament's debate on the report, the European Union's delegation in Bosnia released a statement saying it "rejects any attempts to deny the genocide in Srebrenica."

"We also condemn the use of inflammatory ethno-political rhetoric and actions," it said.

The Srebrenica massacre is the only episode of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war to have been ruled as genocide by both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the UN war crimes tribunal.

The war claimed some 100,000 lives and left the Balkan country split into two semi-autonomous entities: the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation. Each has its own government, president and parliament.

Dodik, known for incendiary rhetoric, was sanctioned by the United States in 2017 for threatening the peace accord that ended the war by pushing to celebrate a controversial Serb-focused holiday.

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