Serbian PM Pelted With Rocks at Srebrenica Ceremony

The “masses broke the fences and turned against us”, Vucic’s associate, Suzana Vasiljevic told AP.

Mr Vucic himself said after returning to the Serbian capital Belgrade: “My hand remains outstretched and I will continue with my policy of reconciliation between the two Balkan nations”.

Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has been chased away by stone-throwing protesters from a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Around 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces after they captured Srebrenica in July 1995 near the end of Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Srebrenica on July 11 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Muslims in the worst mass killing in Europe since World War II.

Vucic, who came to represent Serbia at the commemoration in an apparent gesture of reconciliation, said after the attack that, “Today we are talking more about a bunch of fools rather than about the innocent victims of Srebrenica”.

So raw were their emotional wounds that some mourners hurled stones and bottles at Aleksandar Vucic, the Serbian prime minister, forcing him to flee the ceremony along with his entire delegation. A few minutes later Mr Vucic and others were being moved along a path between the crowds when people began to throw stones at him.

And so the status of the Srebrenica massacres has become one more quarrel along with many others which prevent Bosnia and the region as a whole from moving forward.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who commented on the situation, said the crowd’s reactions had been “normal”.

Soldiers first rounded up and killed 2,000 men before hunting down and executing another 6,000 as they tried to flee the town.

Carried out in the final days of the Bosnian war, the massacre saw over 8000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

“Here in Srebrenica each one of us has to bow our head, not forget, and start building a different future”, he wrote in the book of condolences.

Altogether the conflict cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 people.

Only last month, Milorad Dodik, president of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic where Srebrenica is located, called the massacre “the greatest deception of the 20th century”.

Today, two worldwide courts have labelled what followed as “genocide”, ruling that the killings in Srebrenica did indeed meet the legal definition of this crime.

The Clinton administration led the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation airstrikes against Serb positions in the ’90s, ending the Bosnian war and brokering a peace agreement.

“The global community failed to offer adequate protection to the people in the so-called safe areas, including Srebrenica”.

Serbia, which backed the Bosnian Serbs during the war with men and money, condemned the attack as an “assassination attempt”. The U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo shares that sentiment, and urges all to focus once again on the victims of the Srebrenica genocide and their families.

So far, remains of about 7 000 victims have been excavated from 93 graves or collected from 314 surface locations and identified through DNA technology.