UN condemns Bosnian Serbs over Srebrenica claims

CHALLENGING both the UN war crimes tribunal and world opinion, the Bosnian Serb government said yesterday far fewer Muslims were killed at Srebrenica than the 8,000 commonly reported.

The government report - which also disputed findings that most of the victims were civilians - was denounced by the top international official in Bosnia as a “callous and irresponsible” attempt to rewrite Europe’s worst massacre since WW11.

The report, issued two months before local and national elections in the Bosnian Serb part of the republic and the other half, run by Muslims and Croats, appeared to reflect continued strength by hard-liners loyal to Radovan Karadzic.

Although on the run, the fugitive war time leader of the country’s Serbs sought by the UN war crimes tribunal, still commands the loyalties of many of Bosnia’s 1.2 million Serbs.

The July 1995 massacre came toward the end of the Bosnian war, after Bosnian Serbs took the Muslim enclave. As outmanned and ill-advised Dutch UN peacekeepers stood by, the Bosnian Serb army deported most of the women and girls and started on a day’s-long campaign of killing Srebrenica’s older Muslim boys and men.

The remains of more than 5,000 of the Srebrenica massacre victims have been found in many of the hundreds of mass graves unearthed in the eastern Bosnian region since the war’s end.

Most have been unearthed by forensic experts of the UN war crimes tribunal now trying former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for alleged responsibility in the Bosnian war and other Balkan bloodshed.

Yesterday’s report from the government running the Serb half of Bosnia claimed no more than 2,000 to 2,500 people were killed and of those, 1,800 were soldiers of the Muslim army.

Along with Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb’s top general, Ratko Mladic, remains at large.