Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has said that Bakir Izetbegovic is looking for an excuse to start a new spiral of violence.
This was Vucic's reaction to the statement made by the Bosniak member of the Presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina about legal experts analyzing the Karadzic verdict to find out if it could offer new elements to launch a revision of the charges against Serbia for aggression and genocide.
“Unfortunately, I am not surprised by the news out of Sarajevo,” said Vucic, and added:
“In my first statement after the Karadzic verdict I did not even mention Bakir Izetbegovic, but I seem to have anticipated well that somebody does not want reconciliation in the region, but instead goes against 35 percent of the population of their own country and is looking for any sufficient reason to start a spiral of first political, and then who knows what kind of violence.”
Serbia's response, he continued, is that “we want peace and sincere reconciliation above all, not lawsuits and revisions of lawsuits.”
“But, unfortunately, obviously we don't have a partner, and (obviously) some have understood all this as an opportunity to exact revenge on Serbs instead of reconciliation. And that is the difference of our views of the future,” Vucic concluded.
Croat member of the Presidency, Dragan Covic, however, said he did not expect the Hague Tribunal verdict against the first RS President Radovan Karadzic – that found him guilty of genocide and war crimes – to produce any new elements to justify a revision of Bosnia's charges against Serbia.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) previously ruled that genocide had been committed in Srebrenica but that Serbia was not responsible or complicit in it. The deadline for Bosnia-Herzegovina to renew the case expires in 11 months.
