Ties between Serbia and Bosnia remain fragile 20 years after war

Relations between Serbia and Bosnia have remained tenuous since the end of the Bosnian conflict 20 years ago, as underscored by the stone-throwing attack on the Serbian premier at a ceremony Saturday marking the Srebrenica massacre.

Bosnia's 1992-95 inter-ethnic war left 100,000 people dead and around two million homeless, nearly half the country's population at the time.

The Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia was the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

After capturing Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces in the following days slaughtered around 8,000 Muslim boys and men.

Healing the wounds of war and especially of the Srebrenica slaughter has been hampered by the refusal of Serbia and Bosnian Serbs to call the mass killing a genocide, the conclusion of two international tribunals.
Two decades later multi-ethnic Bosnia, home to Croats, Muslims (Bosniaks) and Serbs, is split into two semi-autonomous halves -- the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

Belgrade has maintained close ties with Republika Srpska, and most Bosnian Serbs look to Serbia as their motherland.

Bosnia and Serbia established diplomatic ties in 2000, but the first signs of improved relations were not seen until a decade after the war.

In July 2005, Serbia's then pro-European president Boris Tadic attended the Srebrenica massacre anniversary to pay his respects to the Muslim victims.

Tadic was promoting the need to accelerate a policy of reconciliation in the volatile Balkans which was torn apart by a series of independence wars in the 1990s with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

Tadic visited Srebrenica again in 2010, and the same year the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution condemning the "crime," and since then relations between Belgrade and Sarajevo have seen some improvement with bilateral visits.

- '100 Muslims for one Serb' -

But Belgrade's persistent denial that a genocide was committed in Srebrenica has continued to burden diplomacy.

And in June, the arrest in Switzerland on a Serbian war crimes warrant of Naser Oric, a former Bosnian Muslim commander who led Srebrenica Muslim forces, sparked outrage in Bosnia.
It eventually forced Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic to call off a visit.

Also, earlier this month Serbia hailed Russia's veto of a draft UN resolution recognising the Srebrenica massacre as genocide.

Still, Vucic decided to attend the 20th anniversary commemoration at Srebrenica that included the burying of the remains of 136 newly identified victims alongside more than 6,000 others already interred at a memorial centre outside the town of Srebrenica.

Perhaps the angry reaction in the crowd of mourners Saturday showed that Vucic's ultranationalist past could not be forgotten. In the 1990s he told Serbian lawmakers that "for every killed Serb we will kill 100 Muslims."

Serbia called the attack an "assassination attempt" and demanded condemnation of the incident by Bosnia.