This year’s anniversary commemoration of the massacres on July 11 comes a month after the Hague war crimes court upheld the conviction of Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic for the Srebrenica genocide and other crimes.

The verdict caused Serbian politicians to reiterate their usual allegation that the Hague court is ‘anti-Serb’, while Serbian newspapers, both pro-government tabloids and ‘serious’ press, hailed Mladic as a ‘hero’ who had been subjected to an ‘injustice’.

Jovana Kolaric, a researcher at the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre, argued that glorifying Mladic is another way to deny the crimes for which he was held responsible.

“Calling Mladic a hero is another strategy of denial that serves to avoid talking about the crimes that were committed, following the logic that if someone is a hero, then he certainly did not commit crimes, and so the crimes did not exist,” Kolaric said.

Politicians and the tabloid media also used Mladic as a symbol of the alleged victimisation of Serbs.

“The defence of Mladic becomes the defence of national identity, and it is always a significant resource for the homogenisation and political mobilisation of society on an everyday political level,” Kolaric explained.

Serbian historian Marijana Toma said that a “state policy of denial” of the Srebrenica genocide was instituted under previous governments, but “gained in strength with [Aleksandar] Vucic and [Ivica] Dacic’s arrival in power together” in 2012.

Toma said that the Serbian public was briefly unsettled by a video of Serbian fighters from the Scorpions unit executing Bosniaks from Srebrenica that was shown in 2005 at Slobodan Milosevic’s trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, but then the authorities’ denial effort entered another phase.

“The short-lived shock of the footage of the shooting of six Bosniak men and boys by a Serbian unit, the Scorpions, was followed by a period of interpretive denial, which focused Serbia’s entire institutional mechanism on just two issues – challenging Srebrenica’s legal qualification as genocide, despite the growing number of verdicts that began to come from the ICTY, but also breaking the link between Serbia and the genocide in Srebrenica,” she explained.

Serbian officials have often repeated that Srebrenica was a “serious crime” but not genocide.

The Scorpions case was tried in a Serbian court as a war crime, not genocide. Another case that is currently ongoing in Belgrade – the much-delayed trial of eight Bosnian Serb ex-policemen accused of involvement in the massacre of 1,313 Bosniaks from Srebrenica – is also being tried as a war crime.

Kolaric explained that officials “consciously avoid the use of the word genocide when talking about Srebrenica”, seeing it as an attack on the nation and “an attempt to make Serbs [look like] a genocidal people”.

The issue remains highly problematic in Serbia “precisely because there is no readiness to face up to the responsibility of our own society for what happened, not only with the genocide in Srebrenica, but also with other crimes committed during the wars”, she argued.

Montenegro: genocide row brings down minister

Headlines in Serbian newspapers describe Ratko Mladic as a ‘hero’ the day after his genocide conviction. Photo: BIRN.

The issue of the Srebrenica massacres also divides society in neighbouring Montenegro, even after the government and parliament has officially recognised them as genocide.

Political leaders of pro-Serb parties in the country, and particularly the right-wing Democratic Front coalition, which is part of Montenegro’s governing majority, have consistently refused to accept this definition, arguing that a war crime was committed, but not genocide.

But they seem to be out of tune with public opinion. According to an opinion survey published by the Centre for Civic Education in May this year, 89 per cent of respondents said they knew what happened in Srebrenica in 1995, and 67 per cent classified the massacres as genocide.

Tea Gorjanc Prelevic from the NGO Human Rights Action said that in Montenegro, only far-right movements and parties still deny that genocide was committed.

“The extreme right, gathered around the Democratic Front coalition and under the influence of Serbian officials, insists on polarisation and denies [the findings of] international courts. They present everything as a conspiracy theory, without any regard for the mass of victims of genocide in Srebrenica and their families,” Gorjan Prelevic told BIRN.

“Unfortunately, such an approach will always have its audience, but at least they are marginalised in Montenegro,” she added.

Disagreements over Srebrenica caused a minister to be fired as recently as last month. After expressing doubts about the Hague Tribunal’s rulings classifying the Srebrenica massacres as genocide, Minister of Justice, Human and Minority Rights Vladimir Leposavic was sacked on June 17.

His dismissal was supported by the votes of opposition MPs and lawmakers from the Black on White coalition, which is also part of the ruling majority.

Leposavic, a pro-Serb politician, had argued in March that the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has no legitimacy because it had destroyed evidence about the alleged trafficking of the organs of Serb civilians in Kosovo during the conflict there.

Leposavic later insisted that he was not denying the Srebrenica genocide but expressing his position on the Hague court in general.

Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapic proposed the dismissal of Leposavic, claiming he had showed no respect for international court rulings. But on June 10, before the vote on the parliamentary resolution on recognising the Srebrenica genocide, Krivokapic criticised it, arguing it would create additional divides in Montenegrin society.

“In this region, there will always be a dichotomy about every historical event. The Hague court made its decision but after 50 years, history could present some details which we don’t know at the moment,” Krivokapic told Vijesti TV.

But on June 17, parliament adopted the resolution with votes from the opposition and from two blocs in the ruling majority, Peace is Our Nation and Black on White.

The third ruling bloc, For the Future of Montenegro, which contains the right-wing pro-Serb Democratic Front, voted against the resolution and called it a provocation against the country’s Serbs.

The resolution prohibits the public denial of the Srebrenica genocide and calls on state institutions to investigate and prosecute war crimes. It also urges the condemnation of all war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, but rejects any attempts to attribute most of responsibility for such crimes to Serbs, Bosniaks or Croats.

It also supports declaring July 11, when Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb forces in 1995, as the Remembrance Day for Srebrenica Victims.

Gorjanc Prelevic said that the resolution was expected, and that it reflects “the real majority mood of people in Montenegro”.

But officials in Belgrade were furious, with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic claiming that the resolution “leaves a stigma on an entire nation”.

Historian Marijana Toma described the Serbian authorities’ reaction to the resolution as “almost hysterical”, comparing them to Belgrade’s angry response to a proposed UN Security Council resolution in 2015 condemning the Srebrenica massacres as genocide.

There are no cases related to Srebrenica being heard at domestic courts in Montenegro, which was part of Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milosevic during the 1990s war years. The EU membership candidate state’s weak efforts to prosecute war crimes have been repeatedly criticised by Brussels.

In April, the Democratic Front accused veteran ex-leader Milo Djukanovic’s administration of supporting Bosnian Serb forces’ deadly operations in Srebrenica in 1995 with fuel, munitions and other technical and logistical assistance.

The Democratic Front called for an investigation. But Djukanovic, who was in power for almost three decades before his party was ousted last year, said that the claims were false information spread by “people close to the Serbian secret service”.

Aleksandra Vukcevic from Podgorica-based NGO called Civic Alliance said that Montenegro hasn’t managed to deal with its wartime past because Djukanovic’s former government ruled the country during the 1990s conflict while some of new ruling parties supported policies that were responsible for war crimes.

“I believe that we will continue to see the use of the Srebrenica genocide to score political points and deepen differences,” Vukcevic told BIRN.

“Victims will be misused in political duelling instead of court proceedings and investigations of the wartime past being conducted,” she said.

Montenegro’s Deputy Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic and Foreign Minister Djordje Radulovic will attend the commemoration at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre on July 11. No official from Serbia has attended since Aleksandar Vucic was attacked by angry mourners in 2015.