Thousands of Bosnian Serbs mourned their dead from the 1990s Srebrenica clashes yesterday, a day after their Bosnian Muslim wartime enemies marked the 10th anniversary of Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II.
Serbs claim that more than 3,000 of their own died in clashes with Srebrenica Muslims during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, though the Serb death toll was never independently documented.
The church services yesterday, attended by thousands of Bosnian Serbs in hamlets in eastern Bosnia, apparently were designed to counter massive ceremonies held Monday to commemorate the July 11, 1995, massacre by Bosnian Serb troops of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
Bosnian Serbs say they overran Srebrenica in 1995 in a revenge attack for earlier Srebrenica Muslim offensives on surrounding Serbian villages that left hundreds of Bosnian Serbs dead.
The head of Serbia's influential Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, sent a message of condolence to both Serbs and Muslims in Srebrenica, and said the commemorations should not be held separately, as they could trigger new divisions and another "chain of bloodletting."
On Monday, some 30,000 Srebrenica survivors, guests and dignitaries paid respects at the site of the 1995 Bosnian Serb offensive, where thousands of Bosnian Muslims were executed and dumped into shallow graves near Srebrenica that continue to be discovered a decade later.
The sound of Muslim prayer echoed through loudspeakers across a sprawling green valley, as family members wandered among the 610 caskets of the most recently identified victims. They were buried beside 1,330 existing graves at a memorial cemetery.
No foreign officials attended the Serb commemorations yesterday, despite invitations, said Milos Milovanovic, the head of a Bosnian Serb war veterans' organization. The most prominent guests included the leaders of the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party, whose paramilitaries fought the Muslims in Bosnia.
Serbia only recently confronted the horrors of Srebrenica, after a videotape showing Serb paramilitaries executing six Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica was broadcast locally.
Serbian pro-democratic President Boris Tadic attended the Bosnian Muslim services on Monday -- a significant gesture given Serbia's wartime backing of the Bosnian Serbs. He was not present at the Serb commemorations yesterday, sending his envoy instead.
Some 250,000 people in total were killed in the 1992-1995 war between Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. About 16,500 bodies have been exhumed from more than 300 mass graves.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS