Serbian president apologizes for Srebrenica massacre

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic has apologized for crimes committed by ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian war, Press TV reports.

The apology is the first of its kind from Serbia regarding the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim boys and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica back in the 1990s.

“I kneel and ask for forgiveness for Serbia for the crime committed in Srebrenica,” Nikolic said, stopping short of calling the killings genocide.

“From the depth of my heart I apologize, I regret…. I apologize for the crimes committed by any individual in the name of our state and our people,” he added.

The Serbian president also said he was planning a visit to Srebrenica.

Nikolic was elected president last May. He stirred controversy when he refused to describe the killings of thousands of Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian war in Srebrenica as genocide, saying it had not been proven by international courts.

This is while critics say that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice both classified the Srebrenica massacre as genocide respectively in 2004 and 2007.

In December, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague convicted former Bosnian Serb General Zdravko Tolimir to life in prison for genocide during the Bosnian war.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, many have mixed feelings about Nikolic’s apology.

“Over the last couple of months we have heard different statements from Nikolic, so this last statement is probably the result of negotiations and agreements and maybe certain pressure from Brussels…,” Young Muslim Association’s Anes Dzunuzovic said.

At the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, Srebrenica was a mainly Muslim town in a Serb-held part of Bosnia. On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran Srebrenica, separated women and children from men, and then systematically murdered the men in mass executions. Mass graves were later found in the area.

The Bosnian War led to the death of at least 100,000 Bosnian citizens and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of others, many of them women and children.