The Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) said on Monday that Patriarch Porfirije gave a blessing to President Aleksandar Vucic prior to his trip to New York to attend the UN General Assembly session that could adopt a resolution on Srebrenica.

The resolution on the war crimes committed in Srebrenica at the end of the war in Bosnia will be debated by the UN GA. Vucic and other state officials have claimed that it will demonize the entire Serbian nation. Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica which was controlled by the Army of the then Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and executed several thousand men and boys. The Hague Tribunal sentenced several senior Bosnian Serb officers for the crime which it ruled was genocide.

The SPC said that its head, Patriarch Porfirije, led a service at the St Sava Temple in Belgrade in the presence of Vucic “who then left for New York for the UNGA session where he will fight against the adopting of the resolution on Srebrenica”.

A SPC press release quoted the Patriarch as saying that “the great powers intend to introduce a resolution on the so-called genocide in Srebrenica which we consider to be untrue and an injustice to the Serb people”. He recalled the Serb victims in both world wars, adding that “the world has forgotten the genocide committed against the Serb people in the 20th century”.

The Patriarch said the resolution is “an attempt to use a simple inversion to declare the Serb people, who are a victim of multiple genocide and ethnic cleansing, as a perpetrator of genocide”. “We are not lessening the extent of the crimes in Srebrenica but as Orthodox Serbs, we are not keeping silent about the crimes against the Serb people in the Srebrenica area. Unfortunately, the people who proposed the resolution disregarded the crimes committed in Serb villages where entire families were exterminated in continuity from 1992 to 1995,” he is quoted as saying.