Several thousand Bosnian Serbs protested in Banja Luka on Thursday against a possible UN resolution to declare July 11 as the international day in commemoration of the genocide in Srebrenica.
Alongside a huge Serbian flag unfurled in the city streets, thousands responded to the call of Bosnian Serb separatist leader Milorad Dodik.
“We do not want to live with you who want to tell the Serbian people that they are genocidal,” he told the crowd.
Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica – then a UN-protected enclave – on July 11, 1995, a few months before Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war ended.
In the following days they summarily murdered approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from the eastern city.
The remains of most of the victims were later found in mass graves in eastern Bosnia, where the perpetrators moved them from the original burial grounds to cover up the crime.
The worst atrocity in Europe since World War II was deemed genocide by international justice.
Under an arrangement to end the war, Bosnia was divided into two semi-autonomous zones, one run by Bosniaks and Croats, and another by Serbs, with Banja Luka as the capital.
Dodik, president of the Serbian entity, demands more autonomy.
According to a draft resolution drawn up by Germany and Rwanda, seen by AFP, July 11 would become the “International Day in Remembrance of the Srebrenica Genocide” from next year, the 30th anniversary of the massacre.
– ‘Impose historical responsibility’ –
Dodik, who has repeatedly denied that the Srebrenica massacre was a genocide, called the resolution unacceptable.
“I feel sorry for every victim,” but “it is a lie that eight thousand people died in seven days,” he told RTRS radio on Thursday.
“They want to impose historical responsibility on the Serbs,” he added, hoping for “more than 40,000 people” to join the protest.
“Those who committed genocide against our and other people in Europe want to label us as their own,” Dodik said on X in a video with nationalist rhetoric calling for protest.
In 2007, Dodik, who was a darling of the West in the late 1990s, said he knew “very well” that the massacre was a “genocide.”
Ten years later he declared ‘in full knowledge’ that ‘no genocide took place in Srebrenica’.
Dodik, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, regularly pays tribute to Bosnian Serb war leader Radovan Karadzic and his army chief Ratko Mladic.
They were both sentenced to life in prison by a UN court for war crimes during the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia, particularly for their role in Srebrenica.
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