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SARAJEVO, February 8 (FENA) - The government of the entity of Republika Srpska yesterday adopted a decision to establish two commissions “to investigate the suffering and killing of Serbs in Sarajevo and to investigate the suffering of all peoples in the Srebrenica region in the period 1992-1995.”
The decision by the entity of Republika Srpska to establish a commission to probe wartime crimes in Srebrenica will not aid attempts to achieve truth and reconciliation, said the US Embassy in Sarajevo in a statement on Friday.
Fears have been expressed by Bosniaks that the commission will attempt to rewrite history to deny that the 1995 Srebrenica massacres by Bosnian Serb forces were genocide.
“The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, have both concluded that what happened in Srebrenica, in July 1995, was genocide. Everyone should respect court decisions and bravely face and accept the truth, regardless of how painful it was. We support the statement of the Peace Implementation Council from December 2018, which condemned the RS National Assembly's conclusions on the rejection of the 2004 report. The establishment of a new commission for Srebrenica does not serve the truth or promote reconciliation,” told the US Embassy Office of Public Affairs in a statement to N1 TV.
They also noted that, regardless of ethnicity, all victims of war deserve to find the truth and for justice to be served.
“As the biggest massacre committed in Europe after the Second World War and a crime against all humanity, the genocide in Srebrenica must never be forgotten and never be minimized. The same applies to all crimes committed during the war in BiH,” it is said in a statement from the US Embassy Sarajevo.
The Serb leaders in the entity of RS do not accept that the massacres constituted genocide, despite the verdicts of international and domestic courts.
The Srebrenica commission will be headed by Gideon Greif, a professor of Jewish and Israeli History at the University of Texas who has been working at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial for more than 30 years. He is also a leading researcher at the Israeli Holocaust Institute, Shem Olam.
(FENA) S. R.
