Banja Luka - Premier of Bosnian Serb entity, the Srpska
Republic, Milorad Dodik, said Monday in Banja Luka that Bosnian Serb
institutions should apologize to families of the victims killed by
Bosnian Serb troops during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Someone, he said, should also make the same apology to Bosnian
Serbs killed during the war in Bosnia, referring to other two
Bosnia's ethnic peoples - Muslims and Croats.
Dodik's reaction followed the verdict of The Hague-based
International Court of Justice (ICJ) which said Serbia, which
supported Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, was not
directly responsible for acts of genocide committed during the war,
but was responsible for violation of the international convention on
genocide.
Dodik also commented on the massacre in the former eastern Bosnian
Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb troops backed by
Serbian paramilitary forces, killed up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men
after capturing the area on 11 July 1995.
The Srebrenica massacre, as he said at a press conference in Banja
Luka, was 'a horrible crime,' and all those responsible for what
happened there must face justice.
Dodik rejected any responsibility of the Srpska Republic, its
institutions and its people for the Srebrenica massacre, stressing
the crime was committed by individuals who must be punished.
The massacre in Srebrenica, he said, cannot be qualified as
'genocide,' since all material evidence proved that the committed
crime was not planned and that the ICJ simply took over some
fragments about the massacre from some previous verdicts of The
Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal.
Stressing he considered the case of Bosnia versus Serbia before
the ICJ 'illegal and illegitimate,' Dodik called on all the parties
in the country for further cooperation in building a better future.
'Everyone in Bosnia should stop with aspirations about the guilt
(in the past), and should focus on how to go further on,' said Dodik.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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