Serbia’s new President drew an angry response from Brussels yesterday after denying that the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslims at Srebrenica was genocide.
Tomislav Nikolic was told that the EU “strongly rejects” his attempt to “rewrite history” in a deepening row before his first meeting with José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, next week.
Mr Nikolic, 60, claimed on the campaign trail that he had converted from his ultra-nationalist days when he served as a deputy Prime Minister under Slobodan Milosevic during the Kosovo war in 1999.
But less than a fortnight after his surprise election victory over the pro-EU Boris Tadic, he has set back Serbia’s European progress with several incautious remarks, declaring that he will not sacrifice Kosovo to join the EU, and offended Bosnia and Croatia with nationalist gibes.
“There was no genocide in Srebrenica,” Mr Nikolic told Montenegrin state television, referring to the organised killings of prisoners in a UN safe haven in July 1995 that have been classified as genocide by two international courts.
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“In Srebrenica, grave war crimes were committed by some Serbs, who should be found, prosecuted and punished,” he added.
“It is very difficult to indict someone and to prove before a court that an event qualifies as a genocide.”
Mr Nikolic’s former boss, Mr Milosevic, died in custody at the Yugoslav Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague before judgment could be passed in his trial for genocide, while the former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic are currently on trial for genocide.
Bakir Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of Bosnia’s presidency, said: “Denying the Srebrenica genocide is not a step on the road to co-operation but a source of new tension.”
A European Commission spokeswoman said: “The European Union strongly rejects any intention to rewrite history.”
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“The massacre in Srebrenica was genocide, as has been confirmed both by the ICTY and the ICJ [International Court of Justice] and the atrocities in Srebrenica in July 1995 were a crime against all humankind and we should never forget it and we should never allow it to happen again.
“That position will be made very clear if and when needed. President Barroso is meeting President Nikolic on June 14. A number of issues, including the very important point of reconciliation in the region and action underscoring that will be part of the agenda.”
In a sign of his anti-Western instincts, Mr Nikolic made his first international visit as president to Moscow, where he pledged not to recognise the breakaway republic of Kosovo as the price for EU membership.
Brussels has never demanded this, with five of the 27 EU members having refused to recognise Kosovo’s independence, but insists on constructive relations between the two.
Mr Nikolic has already significantly raised the temperature in the region with his genocide denial and an apparent claim to Vukovar, a border town in Croatia that was besieged and overrun by the Serbs during the Balkan conflict in 1991. Many of Vukovar’s defenders were massacred by Serb forces and the town was not returned to Croatia until 1998.
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Mr Nikolic told the German newspaper FAZ that a “greater Serbia was his unrealised dream” and that “Vukovar was a Serbian town to which Croats should not return”.