Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity President Milorad Dodik said that no one thinks the crime against Bosniaks in Srebrenica (1995) should be denied, but that the Srebrenica Commission’s report on the Srebrenica genocide should be amended and it should include the events and crimes against Serbs in that region.
“Of course that the crime against Bosniaks happened but the Srebrenica Commission’s report is missing the part concerning the suffering of Serbs,” Dodik said.
In the report that was prepared in 2004, the RS’ Srebrenica Commission made several lists of persons who were killed in July of 1995. Last week, Dodik said they should have annulled the report a long time ago so that manipulation should finally stop, and asked that the RS Parliament schedules a session on August 14, to discuss measures against the report.
He added, Monday, that discussing the report in the RS Parliament does not mean the denial of facts.
“At the same time, we want the report to tell the truth about everything that happened in the Srebrenica region, in order to make it complete,” he added.
Claiming that the report was harmful to the RS, Dodik noted that the “report contains a number of people for whom there is no evidence of their involvement in the crime.”
People’s Democratic Movement (NDP) party’s MP in the RS Parliament said the report on the events in Srebrenica in July 1995 can be amended by the RS Government because some new information and data have surfaced in the past 14 years that were not available when the report was first written. He also noted that the RS Government, and not the Parliament is the most competent institution to amend the report.
“The report contains some things which the Commission itself established based on the data that were available at the time. Numerous trials took place and countless new facts have been determined in the past 15 years which affect the report itself. In that sense, amendment of the report makes sense,” Cavic told N1. “These amendments should be made by the Government, not the Parliament. We thought the RS Government would address the MPs with concrete arguments on the extent to which the report should be amended. Otherwise, the lists of people contained in the report have long been irrelevant.”
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the eastern Bosnian enclave and rounded up the town’s Muslim Bosniaks, separated men from women and little children and systematically executed some 8,000 men and boys.
Two international courts, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) later ruled that the massacre was an act of genocide. International and regional courts have sentenced 45 people for what happened in Srebrenica to a total of more than 700 years behind bars.
Those whom the ICTY sentenced to life imprisonment are Ljubisa Beara, Zdravko Tolimir, and Vujadin Popovic. But the most well known alleged masterminds of what happened in Srebrenica are former Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic and ex Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, and both have been sentenced for it but have appealed.
