Angry crowd attacks Serb PM at Srebrenica ceremony

ANGER boiled over yesterday at a massive commemoration of the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica 20 years ago as people pelted Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vucic with stones, water bottles and other objects.
Volunteers carry coffins with newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre yesterday. Picture: Getty ImagesVolunteers carry coffins with newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre yesterday. Picture: Getty Images
Volunteers carry coffins with newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre yesterday. Picture: Getty Images

An aide, Suzana Vasiljevic, said Vucic’s glasses were broken when he was struck in the face with a stone.

Vasiljevic said she was behind Vucic when “masses broke the fences and turned against us”.

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Tens of thousands of people came to mark the 20th anniversary of Europe’s worst massacre since the Holocaust – the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica – with foreign dignitaries urging the international community not to allow such atrocities to happen again and to call the crime “genocide”.

Vucic, once an ultra-nationalist, came to represent his country at the commemoration in an apparent gesture of reconciliation. He left the ceremony after coming under attack.

Serbia’s foreign minister, Ivica Dacic, said that the attack on Vucic was an attack on Serbia.

“By deciding to bow to the victims, Serbia’s prime minister behaved like a statesman,” said Dacic.

“This is another negative consequence of politicising this subject that has brought new divisions and hatreds instead of reconciliation.”

As Vucic entered the cemetery to lay flowers, thousands booed and whistled. Someone threw a shoe at him. Others threw stones, water bottles and other objects.

Vucic and his guards were forced to run through a crowd that rushed towards them, while the guards tried to protect him with bags, umbrellas and their raised arms.

A few people carried banners with his own wartime quote: “For every killed Serb, we will kill 100 Bosniaks.”

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Serbia and Bosnian Serbs deny that the killings were genocide, and claim that the death toll has been exaggerated.

Dozens of foreign dignitaries – including former US president Bill Clinton, Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Britain’s Princess Anne and Jordan’s Queen Noor – came for the ceremony mourning the 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb troops.

The crime was later defined as genocide by two international courts.

“I grieve that it took us so long to unify … to stop this violence,” said Clinton, who was in office at the time of the massacre and whose administration led the Nato air strikes against Serb positions. This ended the Bosnian war and the US brokered a peace agreement.

During the 1992-95 war, the United Nations declared Srebrenica a safe haven for civilians.

But on 11 July, 1995, Serb troops overran the Muslim enclave. Some 15,000 men tried to flee through the woods towards government-held territory, while others joined the town’s women and children in seeking refuge at the base of the Dutch UN troops.

The outnumbered Dutch troops could only watch as Serb soldiers rounded up about 2,000 men for killing and later hunted down and killed another 6,000 men in the woods.

The UN admitted its failure to protect the town’s people and, yesterday, Bert Koenders, foreign minister of Netherland, said that “the Dutch government shares responsibility” and the UN must strengthen its missions in the future.

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“Nobody can undo what happened here but we mourn with you,” Koenders added.

The 1992-95 war in Bosnia, pitting Christian Orthodox Serbs against Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics, left more than 100,000 people dead and millions more homeless.