“Devaluing the crimes in Srebrenica under the guise of the ‘weight of the term’ is not only intellectually dishonest, but also morally questionable,” Konaković wrote on social media platform X.
“To remind Ambassador Vilan, the comparison of the Holocaust and the genocide in Srebrenica is not a matter of competition in suffering, but recognition that every victim of crimes against humanity deserves equal honor and justice,” he added.
Israeli Ambassador Wilan told the Serbian editorial board of the Russian portal Sputnik on Friday that the Holocaust, or Holocaust of Jews during World War II, was not the only genocide, and that there were other crimes of this type around the world.
“However, when one calls Srebrenica a genocide, in my opinion, it detracts from the meaning of the term.
In my opinion, Srebrenica should not be called a genocide,” Wilan added.
In July 1995,
more than 8,000 men and boys, residents of the country’s Bosnian Muslims, were murdered near Srebrenica - before Serb forces took over the so-called security zone under U.N. supervision.
The remains of some 1,000 victims are still being sought.
International Genocide Remembrance Day
The events in Srebrenica were recognized as an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal and the International Court of Justice. It was
the largest mass murder committed in Europe after World War II and the bloodiest episode of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which claimed some 100,000 lives.
The U,N. General Assembly is scheduled to vote in May on a resolution on the genocide that would establish July 11 - the anniversary of the events in Srebrenica - as
International Genocide Remembrance Day. The discussion surrounding the resolution has sparked sharp disagreements within BiH itself, including threats of secession from political leaders of the Serb Republic, which is part of BiH, who refuse to label the events in Srebrenica as genocide.
The Israeli ambassador’s words were commented on by the Canadian Institute for the Study of Genocide, which deemed them
“radically inhumane and completely false.”
