Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina have held a commemoration ceremony in honor
of some 35-hundred ethnic Serbs killed during the Balkan conflict of
the 1990s.
Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik and other
Bosnian Serb officials attended the event Saturday and laid wreaths at
a memorial in Bratunac, near Srebrenica.
The commemoration
took place one day after Bosnian Muslims marked the 13th anniversary of
the Srebrenica Massacre, in which Serb forces summarily killed
eight-thousand Muslim men and boys.
The top international envoy
to Bosnia, Miroslav Lajcak, attended the ceremony in Srebrenica on
Friday. His deputy Ivan Busniak attended the Bratunac event today.
The
commemorations took place amid increasing tensions following last
week's decision by the United Nations war crimes tribunal that cleared
the former commander of Muslim forces in Srebrenica (Naser Oric) of war
crimes. The ruling angered many Serbs.
In other regional news,
a land mine left over from the 1990s conflict exploded Saturday morning
near the central Bosnian town of Maglaj, killing two mine clearers.
More than a decade after the bloody ethnic conflict ended, parts of Bosnia remain infested with land mine and other explosives.
Some information for this report provided by AFP.
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