Belgrade HC: Serbia's elite responsible for Srebrenica too

N1

Izabela Kisic from Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia (HC) said on Wednesday that “Serbia’s elite took part in the crime (Srebrenica genocide) and not only the executors, but also artists, scientists, the then politicians in power and those in opposition.”

Speaking to N1, Kisic said that those politicians “propagated that nationalistic policy which only put a knife into the executors’ hands.”

Kisic said that even though two international courts declared the war crime in Srebrenica as genocide, it had been blurred in Serbia.

“At least 45 people were convicted for the genocide in Srebrenica, but we still don’t know who many of the perpetrators were, and I think we still have to work on that,” she said.

Kisic added that she did not have much trust in the local judiciary because of the way they had functioned so far mainly in trials regarding Srebrenica case.

“Eight members of Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serbs’ dominated entity in Bosnia) Interior Ministry, suspected to have taken part in the genocide defend themselves while free and considered not dangerous for the society,” Kisic said.

“It’s difficult to expect anything from the current regime, especially from the two ruling political organisations – the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS),” she added.

“When you take part in such dirt, and when you try to hide it, it is difficult to come out of it, you are in it all the time.”

Kisic said that no one denied the Serb victims, but “unfortunately, they are victims of Greater Serbia ideology and the policy that supported it.

They are directly the victims of that war policy.”She said that there were people in Serbia who tried to make the facts public, but the dominant politics was to hide those facts from the public.