The burial of Srebrenica massacre victims at the Potocari Memorial Centre in July. Photo: EPA-EFE/JASMIN BRUTUS.

The US State Department on Wednesday criticised the decision by lawmakers in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity to annul a report that acknowledged that Bosnian Serb forces killed thousands of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in 1995.

“The August 14 session of the Republika Srpska National Assembly is a step in the wrong direction. Attempts to reject or amend the report on Srebrenica are part of wider efforts to revise the facts of the past war, to deny history, and to politicise a tragedy,” the State Department said in a statement.

The State Department said that international courts have concluded that genocide took place in Srebrenica and that Republika Srpska government’s adoption of the 2004 report on the massacres was an important step towards Bosnia and Herzegovina’s reconciliation and towards facing the difficult facts of the past.

“It is in the interest of the citizens of Republika Srpska to reverse the trend of revering convicted war criminals as heroes, and to ensure their crimes continue to be publicly rejected,” the statement added.

The 2004 report, which the Republika Srpska government and a special commission for Srebrenica put together 14 years ago, said the executions of Bosniaks from Srebrenica represented a serious violation of humanitarian law.

But Republika Srpska’s National Assembly voted to annul the report on Tuesday and ordered the entity’s government to form a new commission to produce a new report within a year. The new report must include “the suffering of Serbs in and around Srebrenica” as well as the crimes against Bosniaks, the assembly said.

Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik stated that the 2004 report contained “false data” and was created under pressure from the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia at the time, Paddy Ashdown.

“The Srebrenica crime is an agreed-on tragedy, with the intention of satanising Serbs,” Dodik said.

In order for the report to be formally withdrawn, the National Assembly decision must be confirmed by the entity’s House of Peoples.

But the Bosniak caucus in the House of Peoples said it would invoke a mechanism for the ‘protection of vital national interests’, which allows political representatives of the country’s three main ethnic groups to complain if they believe legislation might be harmful to them, in order to try to challenge the annulment decision.

The head of the Bosniak caucus, Mujo Hadzimerovic, told Bosnian media on Thursday that a final decision will be taken next week.

Verdicts handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Bosnia’s state court have confirmed that Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 7,000 men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995, classifying the slaughter as genocide.

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