West and Russia row over Bosnia ‘genocide’

Western nations and Russia are duelling over whether the UN Security Council should call the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war a genocide in a resolution commemorating the 20th anniversary of Europe’s worst mass killing since the Second World War.

Britain has circulated a draft UN Security Council resolution that “condemns in the strongest terms the genocide in Srebrenica”. It recalls that the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in 2004 and the International Court of Justice in 2007 both determined that the killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in July 1995 were acts of genocide.

Bosnian Serb leaders have been charged with ordering the mass killings of the Muslim men and boys taken from a UN-protected enclave in the eastern Bosnian town.