Serbia Must Face Its Past

Source:The Associated Press
Posted on Tue, Dec. 9, 2008
Courtesy Of The Philly Inquirer-Daily News

BELGRADE, Serbia - Serbia's leading human rights groups said Tuesday that the country must do more to face its role in Balkan war crimes and punish the culprits.

Many Serbs still are reluctant to acknowledge the Serbian role in such crimes as the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.

"The society is ready for a public and thorough examination of its responsibility for crimes against humanity," the groups said in a statement issued ahead of the 60th anniversary of the U.N. convention on human rights. "Serbian institutions have an obligations toward society and the victims' families to publish the facts (and) investigate and punish the perpetrators and instigators."

Serbia has been run by a pro-Western government since the fall of nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

During his decade-long reign in Serbia, Milosevic led the country into four wars and imposed autocratic rule at home.

A U.N. war crimes tribunal tried Milosevic for genocide over crimes committed by the Serb troops in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. He died in detention in 2006.

The proclamation was distributed by the Humanitarian Law Center, a local human rights group that has won international fame for its documenting of war crimes committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. More than a dozen other groups signed and supported the statement.

The human rights organizations said the way forward is to launch a public debate, purge the police and army and arrest war crimes fugitives, including the former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic.

There was no immediate response from the Serbian authorities.