EU rejects Serb leader’s ‘no genocide' in Srebrenica

BRUSSELS: The European Union yesterday "strongly" rejected claims by new Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic that the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica was "no genocide".
"The EU strongly rejects any intention to rewrite history," a European Commission spokeswoman said in response to a Nikolic statement Friday. "The massacre in Srebrenica was genocide," she added.
The spokeswoman said the genocide had been confirmed by both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice.
In an interview broadcast just hours after he was officially sworn in, Nikolic said that the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica amounted to "grave war crimes" but not genocide.
The remarks immediately prompted fears from Serbia's neighbours that Nikolic has not really shed his ultranationalist past harking back to the 1990s collapse of the former Yugoslavia.
The Muslim member of Bosnia's presidency, Bakir Izetbegovic, said "denying the Srebrenica genocide... is not a step on the road to cooperation" but a "source of new ... tension" in the region.
"Our neighbours expect Nikolic to change his rhetoric and convince everyone that he has moved away from his past positions," Serbian human rights activist Natasa Kandic told AFP.
Until 2008 when he formed his own party, Nikolic — a onetime ally of late Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic — was the number two in the ultranationalist hardline Radicals whose leader Vojislav Seselj is currently on trial before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Since breaking with the Radicals, Nikolic transformed himself from an anti-Western hardliner to a conservative pro-European Union nationalist.