SARAJEVO, 12 November 2004 — The Bosnian Serbs’ formal apology for the massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 will mean nothing without the arrest of the perpetrators, analysts said yesterday.
“The apology was a shy, unconvincing one,” political analyst Emir Habul told AFP after the Bosnian Serb authorities ended years of denials and published an apology Wednesday. “It was published on the Bosnian Serb government website. Bosnian Serb leaders didn’t stand in front of the cameras and read it out.”
In a statement posted on the Internet, the government of Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s Serb-run entity, said it “sympathizes with the pain of relatives of the Srebrenica victims and expresses sincere regret and apologies over the tragedy which has happened to them.”
Bosnia’s Serbs are not known for their contrition over the brutal inter-ethnic war that ravaged the former Yugoslav republic from 1992 to 1995. Confronted with evidence of atrocities they usually insist the Muslim and Croat populations share the blame.
But unlike their former foes in the conflict, the Serbs are the only ethnic group in Bosnia who have steadfastly refused to arrest a single war crimes suspect wanted by the UN tribunal at The Hague. The men most wanted for the slaughter at Srebrenica, wartime Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, remain at large somewhere in the former Yugoslavia, where they are seen as heroes by hard-line Serb nationalists.
With this in mind, analysts and the families of the victims, many of whom are still searching mass grave sites in the hope of identifying unclaimed remains, are not convinced that the Serbs are really sorry.
“The apology comes from those who are still refusing to arrest a single war crimes suspect nine years after the war ended,” Habul said, noting that sanctions and diplomatic isolation had failed to budge them.
Bosnian Serb authorities had previously denied that the massacre — classed as an act of genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal — ever happened.
But last month, an internal Serb investigation acknowledged for the first time that the mothers and daughters of the victims, not to mention the foreign experts who had extensively documented the massacre, were telling the truth. The investigation, commissioned under intense international pressure, found what everyone else already knew — that some 7,800 men and boys had been murdered in cold blood when Serb forces overran Srebrenica in July, 1995.
With industrial efficiency, the victims were bused to various killing fields outside the eastern town and shot, often with their hands tied. Their bodies were buried quickly, then exhumed with bulldozers and re-buried elsewhere in a bid to hide the crime.
Before the war, Srebrenica was a mainly Muslim town, but the Serb invasion and the genocide carried out there — the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II — ensured that it now lies in Serb territory.
The Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Sulejman Tihic, said the Serb apology was important, but he cautioned: “Apologies must not be given too much credit”.
