Bosnian Serb PM "Will Never Accept Genocide" Label for Srebrenica Massacre of 8,000 Muslims

Bosnian Serbs will never accept that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslims was genocide, Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik told a Belgrade daily in an interview published yesterday (April 27, 2010).

"We cannot and will never accept qualifying that event as genocide," Dodik -- who heads the Bosnian Serb entity in Bosnia, Republika Srpska -- told the Vecernje Novosti newspaper.

The Srebrenica massacre is the only episode of Bosnia's 1992-95 war to have been ruled a genocide by two international courts -- the International Court of Justice and the UN War Crimes Tribunal.

In a report in 2004, the Republika Srpska government acknowledged the scale of the killing and apologized to the relatives of Muslims killed in Srebrenica.

In his interview, Dodik dismissed the 2004 report, saying it was adopted "under pressure" from the international community's powerful high representative to Bosnia, and that it contained "inexact numbers."