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Mladen Grujicic, the mayor of Srebrenica. Photo: Anadolu.

The Srebrenica municipal assembly decided on Monday that an honorary certificate of thanks will be presented to Milorad Dodik on March 11, when town’s annual holiday is celebrated, sparking anger from Bosniak war victims who describe the Bosnian Serb leader as a genocide denier.

“This whole story has become a political thing but it is not… Dodik did a lot to support Srebrenica, providing various types of support and funds, and that is why he deserves this award,” Mladen Grujicic, the Serb mayor of Srebrenica, told BIRN.

Grujicic is a member of Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, the ruling party in Republika Srpska, which is led by Dodik.

Grujicic is the first Serb mayor of Srebrenica, which lies in Republika Srpska, and has also said that he does not accept that the massacres of Bosniaks from the town by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995 constituted genocide.

He argued that those who have criticised the decision are ignoring the role that Dodik has played in positive developments in Srebrenica over the past several years.

“In 2017 we got 12 kilometres of new road, a kindergarten is in progress… Next year I will support the decision that the award goes to someone from the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina [the country’s Bosniak- and Croat- dominated entity] if someone helps us in the way that President Dodik has,” Grujicic said.

The local committee of the main Bosniak political party, the Party of Democratic Action, called on Bosniaks to boycott Srebrenica Day on March 11 in protest.

“It is embarrassing to grant the recognition of the municipality of Srebrenica to a man who insults the victims of genocide, glorifies war criminals, gives war criminals awards and names institutions after some of the greatest war criminals remembered by civilisation,” the Party of Democratic Action in Srebrenica said in a press release.

A student dormitory in Pale was named after former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic in 2016, while convicted war criminals Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik were honoured by the Assembly of Republika Srpska on Dodik’s initiative the same year.

The Party of Democratic Action called on domestic and international institutions to reassess their cooperation with Grujicic for honouring Dodik, who is subject to US Treasury sanctions for obstructing the peace agreement that ended the 1992-95 war by defying rulings handed down by Bosnia’s state-level Constitutional Court.

Representatives of Bosniak war victims also condemned the decision to honour Dodik.

“This again shows how victims are neglected and how this decision, which is being used for everyday political games in Bosnia, ignores the feelings of those who survived,” Murat Tahirovic, the president of the Victims and Witnesses of Genocide association, told BIRN.

According to the latest population census, 13,409 people live in Srebrenica – 7,248 Bosniaks, 6,028 Serbs and 16 Croats.

Read more:

Srebrenica’s Serb Mayor Repeats Denial of Genocide

Srebrenica’s First Serb Mayor Tries to Escape the Past

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