Serbian government bans Srebrenica anniversary rallies
Serbian authorities have banned all public gatherings in the capital, Belgrade, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.
Serbia's Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said on Friday that the rallies were banned due to security concerns.
“I warn anyone considering rallying anyway that police will neither allow, nor tolerate any gatherings,” the minister said.
The decision came after human rights activists planned to mourn the victims outside the Serbian parliament.
A series of demonstrations were called by around 40 non-governmental organizations to remember the victims. The activists had planned to have thousands of people lie in central Belgrade streets to depict the magnitude of the Srebrenica massacre.
Several thousand activists from all over the world have already begun a three-day-long peace march in Bosnia to commemorate the victims.
Organizers say the march is expected to conclude on Saturday at a cemetery in Potocari, a village in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, just northwest of Srebrenica town.
The participants are also set to attend a mass funeral and burial ceremony there for 136 genocide victims, whose remains were recently identified.
Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the massacre. In July 1995, Serb death squads butchered over 8,000 Muslim Bosnian boys and men in Srebrenica over the course of four days.
The carnage took place after Bosnian Serbs ran over the Bosnian town, even though it was formally declared a UN-protected area. Serb troops overran the zone despite the presence of hundreds of Western troops tasked with protecting innocent civilians.
According to recently declassified US cables, cited in a report by the UK-based daily The Guardian, the British, American, and French governments were prepared to cede UN-protected safe areas to armed Serb militias during the war in Bosnia.
A former Dutch Defense Ministry official has also said that the UN facilitated the takeover of Srebrenica and the brutal carnage there by providing 30,000 liters of fuel gas to Serbs.
The new revelations pose a serious challenge to the official Western version of events.
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