OHR blasts Bosnian Serbs‘ Srebrenica revision plan

The top international envoy to Bosnia sharply attacked the Bosnian Serb government‘s plans to review the list of Srebrenica victims.

SARAJEVO, April 21, 2010 (AFP) - The top international envoy to Bosnia on Wednesday sharply attacked the Bosnian Serb government's plans to review the list of some 8,000 Muslims killed in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.

The announcement by the Bosnian Serb government that it would review the list of the massacre victims is a "despicable attempt to question that genocide took place in Srebrenica in July 1995," a statement from the Office of the High Representative (OHR), Valentin Inzko, said.

By the making the move Bosnian Serbs were "deliberately distorting established historical and legal facts, and propagating misinformation and disinformation with the intent to obscure the truth," it added.

Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik on Monday announced a revision of a special governmental commission report on the massacre, made in 2004, to "prevent manipulations" with the number of victims.

Dodik said that the 2004 list, containing the names of 7,806 victims, was made "under pressure" of the international community.

Bosnian Serbs have long downplayed the Srebrenica massacre. It was not until 2004 that they acknowledged the scale of the killing and apologized to the relatives of Muslims killed in Srebrenica.

After capturing the eastern town on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces summarily executed about 8,000 Muslim men and boys, in the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

So far more than 6,400 victims exhumed from various mass grave sites around the town have been identified by DNA analysis.

The Srebrenica massacre is the only episode of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war to have been ruled as genocide by two international courts -- the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the UN war crimes tribunal -- both based in The Hague.

Bosnia's inter-ethnic war claimed some 100,000 lives. It left the Balkan country split into two semi-autonomous entities -- the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- each having its own government.