SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina
The UN lost its reputation in the 1992-1995 Bosnia War, Turkey’s religious head Mehmet Gormez has said.
Head of Turkey’s Presidency for Religious Affairs, Mehmet Gormez, spoke to Anadolu Agency on Sunday, after participating in the funeral ceremony of more than 100 newly discovered victims of Bosnia’s 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Gormez recalled how people who took refuge in Srebrenica, and were under the protection of UN and Dutch forces, “were massacred and nothing was done."
He also condemned the stance of Pope Francis and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Srebrenica issue. He criticized for Pope Francis not using the term "genocide" during a visit to Bosnia visit in early June.
Russia last week vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning the 1995 massacre as “genocide”.
Gormez said that people should take such a stance in the face of events like Srebrenica despite the religion, race or language of those massacred.
The UN resolution, proposed by the United Kingdom days before the 20th anniversary of the atrocity, noted that "acceptance of the tragic events at Srebrenica as genocide is a prerequisite for reconciliation."
“This shows that some still haven’t yet taken the necessary lessons from what happened on this soil,” Gormez said, adding that it is harrowing that 20 years after the genocide, people still show hesitation on that issue.
The massacre in Srebrenica saw more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys murdered by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries while the town was supposedly under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers during the bloody conflict.
Dutch troops failed to prevent Serb soldiers from seizing Srebrenica and killing around 2,000 on July 11. Around 6,000 more were slain in the surrounding forests over the following days.
