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The Pljevlja authorities ordered on Monday that graffiti in the town centre with the words “Knife, Wire, Srebrenica”, a reference to the thousands of Muslims killed by Bosnian Serbs in 1995, caused offence to Bosniaks and should be removed.

The graffiti appeared last week and a local NGO, the Youth Forum of Bosniaks, immediately called for its removal, but the authorities only acted after the intervention of Bosnia’s ambassador to Montenegro, Izmir Talic.

As well as the Srebrenica graffiti, a graffiti portrait of a local commander from the Serbian nationalist Chetnik movement, Bozo Bjelica, who was executed in 1951, was also erased.

“There was no approval for the drawing and it was ordered to be whitewashed,” said Milovan Gogic, secretary of the local administration in Pljevalja, newspaper Blic reported.

According to Blic, police questioned those responsible for drawing the picture last week, but they claimed that it actually depicted Petar II Petrovic Njegos, a famous Montenegrin poet, bishop and 19th century ruler, not the Chetnik commander Bjelica.

This caused the NGO Amnesty to accuse the Pljevlja authorities on Monday of showing intolerance towards the town’s Orthodox population for ordering the removal of a picture of Njegos under pressure from Bosniak organisations.

Pljevlja lies near the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and has a mixed Montenegrin-Serb-Bosniak population.

The authorities in the past have also ordered the removal of anti-Serb graffiti in the town.