News in English     | 06.06.2018. 16:47 |

Serbs to honor Srebrenica genocide-denying Russian diplomat Vitaly Churkin

FENA Press release

SARAJEVO, June 6 (FENA) - Serbian cultural association will install a statue of the former Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, who vetoed a 2015 UN draft resolution that condemned the Srebrenica massacre as genocide.

A Serbian cultural association called Srpski Krivak has announced that it will erect a statue of Vitaly Churkin in February next year in Russia, honoring Moscow’s late ambassador to the United Nations who vetoed a resolution that would have condemned the 1995 Srebrenica massacres as genocide.

“[The sculpture] is just over two-and-a-half meters, cast in bronze; the base will be around a meter, so the total height is around three-and-a-half meters,” the sculptor Dragan Radenović, a member of the association, told BIRN.

Radenović said that the sculpture shows Churkin with his right hand “characteristically raised” and a coat hanging from his left arm, modelled after the Ancient Roman toga.

According to Radenović, the statue will be installed opposite the house where Churkin used to live in his hometown of Marinkino, north-east of Moscow.

He added that Churkin “has become a well-known and important man from his region”, because he was decorated with the highest national honors by the presidents of both Russia and Serbia.

Radenović has previously told Radio Free Europe that he considers Churkin’s greatest deed for Serbia to be the vetoing of a 2015 British-sponsored resolution at the UN Security Council that would have condemned the 1995 Srebrenica massacres as genocide.

The resolution was intended to mark the 20th anniversary of the murder of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces.

The crime was classified as genocide by the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Churkin, who died in February 2017, was also the Russian envoy in the peace negotiations during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1994.

Another association, the Bosnian Serb-run Eastern Alternative, wanted to install a memorial to Churkin in the town park in Srebrenica in gratitude for his blocking of the UN Security Council resolution.

The initiative was condemned by associations representing the families of Srebrenica victims as an attempted provocation, and in the end it fell through.

However, the Eastern Alternative did install a monument to Churkin in Eastern Sarajevo in Republika Srpska in November 2017.

(FENA) S. R.

Vezane vijesti

The first monument to the victims of genocide in Srebrenica and BiH unveiled in Florida

Bomberger: We stand together with the families, the facts of the genocide have been established

US State Department: It is necessary to accept incontrovertible facts of the Srebrenica genocide

Promo

M:tel: Savršena kombinacija – Huawei telefon i pametni sat s popustom

M:tel: Stiglo nam je Proljeće!

Predstava 'Kako sam se nadala dobro se nisam udala' u BKC Sarajevo