Serbian prime minister flees from booing crowds at Srebrenica memorial

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has reportedly fled a memorial service of the Srebrenica massacre after the crowd booed him out of the event.

About an hour after his arrival on Saturday in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica to attend a ceremony at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial marking the 20th anniversary of the massacre, the crowd started to chant slogans against Vucic, forcing him to seek shelter in the cover provided by his bodyguards.

The crowd booed Vucic as he entered a hangar which was prepared for him and other foreign dignitaries. When he came over to lay flowers at a monument of the victims, people began to hurl stones at him.

A report by the Serbia's state news agency, Tanjug, said Vucic was hit on the head by a stone.

The reaction by the mostly Bosnian Muslims comes against the backdrop of relentless efforts by Vucic to block a UN Security Council draft resolution earlier in the week which sought to recognize the 1995 killings of more than 8,000 Muslims by the ethnic Serb troops as "genocide." Moscow vetoed the draft which was submitted by Britain, claiming that it could further deepen divisions in Bosnia, a country of Muslims, Croats and Serbs.

The decision by Russia prompted Srebrenica organizers to withdraw an invitation to the Russian ambassador for the Saturday ceremony.

Two international courts have already defined the killings as genocide, despite opposition from Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs.

The Srebrenica massacre is known as the worst mass killing in Europe since the end of World War II. The massacre of the Muslim boys and men came near the end of the ethnic conflict in July 1995, when Serbs rounded up 2,000 mostly Muslim men in the town which was under the protection of UN peacekeepers. The forces of General Ratko Mladic then hunted fleeing people in the woods outside Srebrenica and killed another 6,000.

According to recently declassified US cables, cited in a report by the UK-based daily The Guardian, the fall of Srebrenica formed part of the policy of the British, American, and French governments and by the UN leadership.

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.

Tens of thousands gathered in the memorial complex Saturday to commemorate the victims and to lay the remains of 136 victims to rest. The newly-found bodies have been identified through DNA technology, and efforts still continue to excavate the remains of some 1,000 missing people from 93 graves or from 314 surface locations.

The ceremony was also attended by former US President Bill Clinton and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu along with a number of other foreign dignitaries. Vucic had condemned the massacre in a statement before his arrival in Srebrenica.

Nearly 100,000 people lost their lives and a million more became homeless as a result of the bloody 1992-95 war. A peace deal brokered by the United States ended the conflict by dividing the ethnically mixed Serb-led Yugoslavia in two states, namely Serbia, which is controlled by the Serbs, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is shared by the Bosniaks and Croats and a minority of Serbs.

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