ISLAMOPHOBIA REPORT

ISLAMOPHOBIA IN Serbia
Republic of Srpska on 11 July 1995 captured the town of Srebrenica, which was a UN
protected area and that on this occasion around 25,000 ‘Bosnian’ women and children
were expelled, and in the coming days 7-8,000 men of different ages were systematically
murdered or executed. Here the author uses data from The Hague indictment, as well as
data from the indictment and the verdict for the general of the Army of the Republic of
Srpska, Radislav Krstic. However, the author fails to report data relating to the pre-history
of the conflict in Srebrenica and crimes committed by members of the Muslim
forces in relation to the Serb population in the area, which was practically destroyed,
and which certainly had an impact on the existence of retaliatory motives at large for
some members of the RS Army.” (page 225-226) Continuing on the Srebrenica case,
the author wants to acknowledge the crime, but he provides a wider picture, because:
“the crimes are indefensible... but it still has to be concluded that the numbers of people
killed cannot be so easily stated; it is not possible to ignore that, this case, apparently,
was predominantly about revenge by Serbian soldiers for previous crimes committed by
members of the Muslim formations; thus, there is a great question about whether such
a ‘retaliatory intent’ can easily be identified with genocidal intent.” (Page 227.) This
interpretation of the Srebrenica Genocide is a textbook example of the interpretative
denial in which the essence is not to deny the actual facts, but to give them a different
meaning and context. The author also analyses the problematic issues in the Krstic
judgment (On 2 August 2001, Krstić became the first man convicted of genocide by
the ICTY, and was sentenced to 46 years in prison. He was the third person to have ever
been convicted under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide), stressing that there was no evidence for the number of 8,000 killed
(page 228-233) and then calls into question the concept of responsibility of General
Krstic, concluding that in the Krstic case the genocidal intent of the convicted general
was established in a vague and uncertain way (page 232). 11
An additional problem in the field of education is school textbooks for national
minorities (especially Albanians and Bosniaks), people who tend to be adherents
of Islam. Although in previous years the Ombudsman of the Republic of Serbia
also found that the rights of Bosniak students were being violated as they were not
receiving education in their mother tongue and found that the Ministry of Education,
Science and Technological Development had failed to take measures in order
to correct all the problems and obstacles standing in the way of organizing classes
in the Bosnian language, this bad practice had not been rectified by 2015, but was
even worse. 12 (Example: the Ombudsman, based on the complaint of the National
11. Milan Škulić, Međunarodni krivični sud-nadležnost i postupak, (Beograd: Centar za publikacije Pravnog fakulteta
u Beogradu, 2005.)
12. Ombudsman of the Republic of Serbia, Povređena prava učenika bošnjačke nacionalnost da se obrazuju na
maternjem jeziku, (2014). Accesed November 19, 2015. http://www.pravamanjina.rs/index.php/sr/podaci/dokumenta/-/611-povreena-prava-uenika-bonjake-nacionalnost-da-se-obrazuju-na-maternjem-jeziku
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