Serbia’s prime minister has been chased out of a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre by a huge crowd throwing stones and bottles.
Tens of thousands of people turned out for the event to remember the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims who were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in a UN refuge in 1995. But the crowd turned on Aleksandar Vučić, who was whisked away by bodyguards. The delegation were seen running for their cars and a Bosnian government source later said they had left the site.
“This is a scandalous attack and I can say it can be seen as an assassination attempt,” the Serbian interior minister, Nebojša Stefanović, said on Serbian Pink television. “Bosnia has failed to create even the minimal conditions for the safety of the prime minister.”
The Srebrenica massacre was the worst in Europe since the Holocaust and was later defined as a genocide by two international courts. This week, Russia vetoed a proposed UN resolution that called the event a genocide, sparking a diplomatic row with Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Saturday’s ceremony was set to include the funeral of 136 newly found victims, who were to be buried at a memorial centre alongside a mass grave of more than 6,000.
Dozens of foreign dignitaries, including Britain’s Princess Anne, the former US president Bill Clinton, Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, and Jordan’s Queen Noor, were due to attend the event.
Serbia, which backed Bosnian Serb forces with soldiers and funding during the war, last week enlisted its ally Russia to veto the British-backed UN resolution that would have condemned the denial of Srebrenica as genocide, as a UN court had ruled it was.
Many Serbs dispute the term, the death toll and the official account of what went on, reflecting conflicting narratives about the Yugoslav wars that still feed political divisions and stifle progress toward integration with western Europe.
Vučić is a former ultranationalist who once said that his country would kill 100 Muslims for every Serb who died. During the 1990s, he was a disciple of the “Greater Serbia” ideology which fuelled much of the bloodshed that accompanied Yugoslavia’s demise.
However, he has since described the Srebrenica massacre as a “horrible crime” and rebranded himself as pro-western.
During the 1992-95 war, Srebrenica was declared a safe haven by the UN and became a shelter for thousands of civilians. But on 11 July 1995, Serb troops overran the Muslim enclave.
About 15,000 men tried to flee through the woods toward 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 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.
Remains of about 7,000 victims have been excavated from 93 graves or collected from 314 surface locations and identified through DNA technology. None of the 136 bodies to be buried on Saturday were complete.
Hamida Dzanovic, who attended Saturday’s ceremony to bury two bones identified as those of her missing husband, was among those in the crowd to condemn Vučić.
“Look at him and look at those thousands of tombstones,” she said. “Is he not ashamed to say that this was not genocide? Is he not ashamed to come here?”
Kada Hotic, whose son and husband were killed in the massacre, said: “Only on truth we can build a future. You cannot deny the truth. All of my family members are here under these tombstones. This cannot be denied. Because of our future, we need good relations.”
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