Serbian Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac said that voting on the resolution on the Srebrenica massacre will show who on the Serbian political scene behaves and thinks like a responsible person, and who remains in a past era that should be long behind the country.
In an interview with the Tanjug news agency, Sutanovac said that voting on the resolution would be a test for the country's politicians on whether they are honest in opting for adopting the European system of values.
“I recognize the handwriting of those that will be against it, because that handwriting has been recognisable since the 1990s,” he said.
Serbia's President Boris Tadic launched an initiative for the adoption of the two parliamentary resolutions on January 13, claiming that Serbia has a moral obligation to adopt a resolution condemning the Srebrenica crimes. But at the same time, he supported the idea of a separate resolution condemning war crimes committed against Serbs, noting that in this way parliament will avoid allocating "collective guilt".
Srebrenica has become a byword for genocide and a symbol of the horror of Bosnia's 1992-95 war. Around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were executed by Bosnian Serb forces after they overran the UN-protected enclave in July 1995.
Serbian Parliamentary Speaker Slavica Djukic-Dejanovic told broadcaster RTS on Saturday that she would hold consultations on the declaration with parliamentary whips next week.
“It is very likely that there will be an effort to coordinate these drafts, because it is important for us to not have only 126 MPs [out of 250] voting for the resolution in the end,” the broadcaster quoted Djukic-Dejanovic as saying.
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In July 1995 Srebrenica was shelled and occupied by the Army of Republic of Srpska,VRS, despite being declared a protected area by the United Nations. More than 7,000 people were killed, the victims of genocide.
The Bosnian Serb commander’s role in the genocide committed in Srebrenica is described in detail in many indictments and verdicts pronounced before local and international judicial institutions.
Indictments in 1995 and 2000, further amended in 2002 and 2010, charge the former commander of the Republika Srpska Army with genocide and other crimes.
When Mladic ordered his army to bomb the people of Sarajevo until they ‘go insane’, he revealed the murderous intentions that would culminate in the Srebrenica massacre.