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News, Politics, Government

US, Canada, Jordan, boycott UN meeting on justice

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Barred from speaking at a U.N. meeting on international criminal justice, Bosnian activist Munira Subasic, who lost 22 close family members in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, said she felt powerless as she listened to Serbia‘s ultranationalist president attack the U.N. war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia as politically biased.

Subasic said Wednesday that she believed that Serbian President Tomslav Nikolic was also denying the genocide at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs that killed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys, including her husband and beloved youngest son, Nermin. It was Europe‘s worst massacre of civilians since World War II.

As her hurt and anger rose, Subasic said she put on a T-shirt which she had brought as a gift for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, saying “Srebrenica” on which she had added the words “Justice Is Slow But It’s Reachable.” Next to her, she said, was a banner highlighting the genocide in the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia, Republika Srpska.

“All of a sudden I was surrounded by security … and in a very curt manner they told me that I have to leave the room,” Subasic told reporters.

She blamed U.N. General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic, a former Serb foreign minister, who organized the meeting and had banned her organization, the Mothers of Srebrenica, from making a five-minute statement. His spokesman Nikola Jovanovic said Jeremic has no personal security and doesn’t give instructions to U.N. security and speculated she was removed because of the T-shirt and banner.

Subasic’s expulsion followed a boycott of the meeting by the United States, Canada and Jordan because it didn’t include Bosnia’s war victims and gave Serbian officials a platform to attack the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal instead of focusing on the broader announced theme, the “Role of International Criminal Justice in Reconciliation.”

To protest the victims’ exclusion, Jordan‘s U.N. Ambassador Prince Zeid al Hussein and Liechtenstein’s U.N. Ambassador Christian Wenewaser hosted a press conference for the Mothers of Srebrenica and the Association of Witnesses and Survivors of Genocide.

Zeid, who was a U.N. peacekeeper in Bosnia and served from 2002 to 2005 as the first president of the Assembly of States Parties for the International Criminal Court, encouraged other countries in the 193-nation General Assembly to boycott the meeting.

But it was impossible to say whether any did because Jeremic moved the meeting from the main General Assembly chamber, where all countries have

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News

News, Politics, Government

Bosnian Serb President testifies for Karadzic

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One Bosnian Serb leader testified in defense of another at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal Tuesday, blaming Muslims’ wishes for an Islamic state in Bosnia for fueling the country’s ethnic war.

Radovan Karadzic, accused by United Nations prosecutors of orchestrating Serb atrocities throughout the 1992-95 Bosnian war, called one of his successors, Milorad Dodik, as a defense witness at the long-running genocide trial.

Dodik, like Karadzic, blamed Muslims for the war in Bosnia that left some 100,000 dead, accusing the Muslims’ wartime leader Alia Izetbegovic of seeking to turn Bosnia into an Islamic state.

Dodik, now president of the Serb entity in Bosnia, Republika Srpska, said Izetbegovic tried to push his plan for an Islamic state under Sharia law despite not having a majority in Bosnia in the months before war broke out.

“I recognized his activities at the time and how he was carrying out his political plan,” Dodik said. “It has elements of fanaticism.”

He said elements of Izetbegovic’s political party began arming Muslims before the war and that the first victims of the conflict were Serbs shot by Muslims.

“Izetbegovic laid the foundations of the conflict,” Dodik said.

One of Karadzic’s key defense arguments is that Serbs took up arms only as a last resort to protect themselves from Muslim aggression as the former Yugoslavia crumbled in the early 1990s.

However, most cases at the U.N. court involve allegations of Serbs persecuting and expelling Muslims and Croats from territory they considered part of a greater Serbia.

Karadzic faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if he is convicted.

Dodik, a Serb politician at the time of the war, has dominated the Bosnian Serb political scene since the end of the conflict. He has opposed international efforts to unite the country after the war partitioned it, and continues to advocate independence or at least greater autonomy for the Bosnian territory the Serbs gained during the war – one of Karadzic’s wartime goals.

Dodik has repeatedly denied the genocide in Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb forces massacred some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995, and is a very vocal critic of the Hague tribunal or …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News