No sane person can remain indifferent to the sight of thousands of tombstones in the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Centre, but the figure of those who were killed in Srebrenica is not accurate and neither is the definition of the crime, the mayor of Srebrenica said on Wednesday.
“Every loss is difficult, I know that. But the definition of the crime is wrong,” said Mayor Mladen Grujicic, referring to the ruling of two international courts thatlabeled the Serb massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from the eastern town a genocide.
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He said the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague never convicted anybody for killing Serbs.
“How can we trust a court that judged only one nation and was one-sided? The court created a total split when it favoured one people and degraded the other. A court that condemns only one nation cannot be trusted,” he said.
“Here, Croats, the Roma, Serbs and Bosniaks were killed, but it seems that only the Serbs were doing the killing,” he said ironically.
A commemorative session of the Srebrenica Municipal Assembly honored the victims of the 1992-95 war on Wednesday, a day before the annual commemoration, and Mayor Mladen Grujicic reminded that not only Bosniaks were killed in the municipality.
He pointed out that he will not go to Potocari on Thursday to take part in the commemoration.
“I have at the beginning of my mandate expressed my wish to bow to all the victims, but that was met with opposition by the organisers of the commemoration on July 11th, and in a conversations with the Bosniak representatives we concluded that it was not the right time for such a move,” Grujicic said.
He said he strives toward doing it and believes that “the moment will come when we will form a joint team that will visit all battlefields on the territory of the municipality of Srebrenica.”
He assessed that tensions in Srebrenica are being caused by “interference from the outside”.
“Had it not been for influences of parts of the international community and from Sarajevo and Banja Luka, Bosniaks and Serbs would have reached an agreement a long time ago,” Grujicic said.
Asked by reporters why Serb representatives continue to deny the judgments handed down by tribunals regarding the Srebrenica genocide, the mayor responded with a question: “Who killed the Serbs?”
He said that Serbs have “apologised and admitted that a crime took place a thousand times,” but that those on “the other side” have never done so.
“Coexistence cannot be just the will of one side,” he concluded.
