SERBIA-BOSNIA/VUCIC Vucic says attack by Srebrenica crowd "nothing" compared to war victims' suffering

Record ID: 146192

  • Title: SERBIA-BOSNIA/VUCIC Vucic says attack by Srebrenica crowd "nothing" compared to war victims' suffering
  • Date: 22nd July 2015
  • Summary: COVIC AND VUCIC STANDING AND LISTENING TO BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA'S NATIONAL ANTHEM WELCOME CEREMONY IN PROGRESS VARIOUS OF COVIC AND VUCIC WALKING BY GUARD OF HONOUR
  • Embargoed: 6th August 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Serbia
  • Country: Serbia
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA8O2F656LTW8LON97SXO44QPOY
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Serbia's prime minister said on Wednesday (July 22) that an attack on him in Bosnia 11 days ago was "unpleasant" but "almost nothing" compared to the sufferings in the region during the 1992-95 war.
    Aleksandar Vucic was hounded by mourners hurling stones and bottles from a commemoration in Srebrenica marking the 20th anniversary of the massacre of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys executed after the U.N. safe haven fell to Bosnian Serb forces towards the end of the war.
    Vucic immediately called on Bosnia's tripartite presidency - part of a cumbersome power-sharing arrangement between Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats - to visit the Serbian capital, once capital of federal Yugoslavia.
    "I am ready to look at our future cooperation in a friendly manner, because what happened to me in [Srebrenica] was unpleasant, was difficult, but that is almost nothing, compared with what happened to many Bosniaks, many Serbs and Croats, who lost their loved ones, and in this war many houses were burned, many were killed, many more than in some previous wars. If those people are ready to forgive and to look into the future, it would be unwise politically for me to say that because of that [Srebrenica incident] I cannot think about the future. I look only to the future," Vucic said.
    The leaders spoke of leaving 'history to historians', building a brighter future for the Balkans and of strolling the streets of Belgrade after a joint lunch.
    But they skirted around new tensions sparked by a Bosnian Serb plan to put the authority of Bosnia's national court to a referendum that the West says would challenge the very integrity of the state.
    "We want what we just talked about, to begin the strong development of the region, because we are leaning on one another, and that's why we need stability and certainty, but we cannot have these two without a strong process of reconciliation," the Bosnian member of the tripartite presidency, Bakir Izetbegovic, said.
    Serbia backed the Bosnian Serbs with men and money during the Bosnian war, in which 100,000 people died. A United Nations court has ruled the Srebrenica mass killings constituted genocide, a term Serbia and many Serbs dispute.
    Vucic at the time was an outspoken ultranationalist. He has since rebranded himself as a pro-Western reformer dedicated to taking Serbia into the European Union.
    Last week, he urged Serbs in Bosnia to think again before holding a referendum on the authority of the national court over them, responding to Western warnings that the vote would represent an open threat to the integrity of the Bosnian state.
    The West sees the move as part of a growing challenge by Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, president of Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic, to Bosnia's survival as a state.
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