BOSNIA: Serbs around Srebrenica have honoured relatives killed in Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, just a day after the town hosted a huge ceremony for almost 8,000 Muslims slaughtered there 10 years ago.
At Orthodox churches close to Srebrenica, which brutal "ethnic cleansing" turned into a Serb-dominated region, thousands of people attended services to mourn their dead and remind the world that Serbs also were among the 200,000 killed in the conflict.
But whereas Monday's ceremony saw dozens of foreign dignitaries join 25,000 Muslims at a costly memorial centre, yesterday's event at an unfinished Serb shrine attracted only locals and a few nationalist leaders from Belgrade. "This is not an attempt to negate yesterday's commemoration of the tragedy in Srebrenica," said Dragan Cavic, president of Bosnia's Serb-run republic. Rather, it was a "demonstration of a wish that all the crimes which took place here be seen equally and judged by the same criteria, regardless of the religion of the victim and the perpetrator", he said.
The head of the Serb Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, sent condolences to both Serbs and Muslims at Srebrenica, and Serbia's president, Boris Tadic - who laid a wreath at the Muslim ceremony - sent only an envoy yesterday.
Among the guests yesterday were leaders of Serbia's far-right Radical Party, whose paramilitaries fought Muslim forces in Bosnia and who still pledge allegiance to Slobodan Milosevic, the ousted Yugoslav president accused of war crimes. In Bratunac - a town close to Srebrenica, where Serbs are building their own war memorial without any foreign funding - feelings run high over the world's perceived indifference to Serb suffering. "For every memorial to Serb war victims there are 10 for the Muslims; for every grant to help us, there are 10 for them; for every one Muslim sent to The Hague, 10 Serbs are extradited," said Serb community leader Vinko Lale recently.
"Why does no one talk about the crimes of the Muslim fighters from Srebrenica, about why the UN let them keep their weapons in a so-called safe haven and how they used them to attack Serb villages and torture, rape and murder ordinary Serbs?"
Bosnian Serb groups claim that more than 3,000 Serb civilians were killed by Muslim forces, most, they allege, commanded by Srebrenica's chief defender, Naser Oric, who now faces trial at the UN tribunal in The Hague.
Serbs often call the massacre at Srebrenica a response to crimes committed by troops led by Oric, whose picture adorned T-shirts worn by some Muslims at Monday's ceremony. Many Bosnian Serbs also still lionise their wartime political and military leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Gen Ratko Mladic, who have been on the run for almost a decade.
Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat who crafted a peace settlement for Bosnia, yesterday accused the Serb Orthodox Church and members of the SDS, the main Bosnian Serb political party, of sheltering Mr Karadzic.