Members of the Women in Black, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia and the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights gathered in Belgrade to raise awareness about the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide, often described as the worst crime committed in Europe since WWII.
The Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center said in a statement that Serbia is the first and so far the only country in the world that was declared responsible for violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the International Court of Justice (2007) because its state authorities were informed about the Srebrenica Genocide but did nothing to prevent it.
Nikada nećemo zaboraviti genocid u Srebrenici. #Srebrenica25 pic.twitter.com/kYCAGmrAyl
— Fond za humanitarno pravo (@FHPHLC) July 10, 2020
The individual criminal responsibility of a large number of members of Serb armed groups and political institutions, who acted in the spirit of the ‘Greater Serbia’ territorial project – which the Srebrenica Genocide was part of – was proven beyond a reasonable doubt by a series of verdicts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
“It is a shameful and devastating fact that none of the officials of the Republic of Serbia have characterized (the events in) Srebrenica as genocide since 1995, which confirms the continuity of genocide denial at the levels of the state and society.
The continuous rejection by the current President of the Republic of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, and Prime Minister, Ana Brnabic, to call the crime in Srebrenica a genocide, which not only politicians of the ruling coalition but also a significant number of opposition politicians follow, contributes to the state policy of genocide denial the most.
The words ‘genocide in Srebrenica’ are forbidden for Serbia’s state institutions, and freedom and public space are unlimited for genocide deniers in the regime’s media, while no verdict has been passed in Serbia’s courts which qualifies the crime in Srebrenica as a genocide.
In short, Serbia is not only a state of organized forgetting of crimes, erasing traces of committed crimes, but also of the ideology that enabled that state-organized crime – genocide,” the Humanitarian Law Center said.
