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| DRAFT RESOLUTION ON SREBRENICA FOR THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE REPUBLIC OF SERBIA |
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| Monday, 13 July 2009 08:51 | |
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On Friday, July 10, 2009, the Dutch NGO Srebrenica Historical Project called a press conference in Belgrade to offer a comprehensive critique of the resolution on Srebrenica which the European parliament in Strasbourg adopted on January 15 of this year. At the same time, the Project presented to the media its own draft resolution on this subject which the National Assembly of Serbia should urgently pass. The Srebrenica resolution which the European Parliament passed on January 15 contains a number of deficiencies which make it unacceptable and the National Assembly of Serbia should not pass any document which follows that pattern*. Among its shortcomings are the following: 1. The European Parliament resolution ignores the genocide and the suffering of other ethnic communities in Europe during the twentieth century: Jews, 6 million; Armenians, 1,5 million; Roma, 500,000. The sum of victims in each of those communities exceeds by many times the highest estimate of Bosnian Moslem losses around Srebrenica in July of 1995, which is about 8,000. That makes the resolution fundamentally unbalanced and it encourages suspicion that it was inspired by political, rather than humanitarian considerations. The National Assembly of Serbia should not identify itself with a document which is so blatantly one-sided and biased. 2. The European Parliament resolution improperly treats a massacre involving at most 8,000 persons as a crime of the same weight and moral magnitude as the Holocaust of six million Jews during World War II. That is unacceptable because it minimizes a genuine genocide which during the twentieth century actually did occur in Europe, and which everyone accepts as an unchallenged fact. The National Assembly of Serbia, as the highest representative institution of the Serbian people, must not become involved in such insensitive and offensive reshaping of the historical record at the expense of its Jewish fellow citizens. 3. It makes the point that the issue of Srebrenica is to this day, a decade and a half after the event, fully open and far from being clarified in any of its essential aspects. It rejects the imposition of politically driven final conclusions and the unjustified attribution of guilt to anyone but the direct perpetrators.
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