Serbs deny Srebrenica genocide, UN to press on for arrests

Apr 27, 2010, 19:19 GMT

   Belgrade/Sarajevo - A Bosnian Serb leader denied Tuesday that the killing of the men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica during the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s amounted to genocide, even as a United Nations prosecutor said the arrest of the man accused of the crimes remains a 'top priority.'

Bosnian Serb Premier Milorad Dodik said in an interview published Tuesday that the 1995 killings in Srebenica were not genocide, and also that the number of victims was lower than reported.

'We cannot and will never accept to qualify that event as genocide,' Dodik, the premier of the Serbian part of Bosnia, told the Belgrade newspaper Vecernje Novosti.

He insisted that the number of Muslim boys and men killed by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995, estimated at around 8,000, was 'manipulated.'

'We already established that 500 people from the list (of victims) is alive and more than 250 of those buried in (the memorial cemetery) Potocari have not even been killed in Srebrenica,' he said, contradicting a verdict by the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ).

His comments run contrary to what The Hague-based ICJ ruled in 2007 when it said that actions by Serb forces there were 'committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and ... were acts of genocide.'

The UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia has charged the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, Ratko Mladic, with genocide for Srebrenica and the shelling of Sarajevo during the 1992-95 war.

Speaking in Srebrenica during his three-day visit to Bosnia, the UN war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz said that bringing Mladic to justice remains top of the list.

'His arrest remains a priority for The Hague tribunal, but also for Serbia,' Brammertz said after meeting the relatives of the victims in the eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave.

The European Union has blocked Serbia's progress toward membership because the country has failed to bring Mladic to justice. Brammertz said he is due to visit Belgrade in mid-May and press for Mladic's arrest.

Mladic's political supremo, Radovan Karadzic, is currently facing charged of genocide at an international court in The Hague. Serbia handed Karadzic over after arresting him in Belgrade in 2008, after 13 years of denying that he was hiding on its soil.