20 years on Serbs refuse to call Srebrenica 'genocide'

Their leaders have paid their respects to the victims, begged forgiveness "on their knees," and deplored a "heinous crime," but Serbia and Serbs still stubbornly refuse to call the Srebrenica massacre a genocide, experts say.

International courts have ruled that the 1995 killing of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the ill-fated Bosnian town by Serb forces was genocide, "but here it is difficult to say that word," prominent independent political analyst Vladimir Goati said.
 
"Some even have a physical discomfort when it comes to saying it," he added.
 
Bosnian Serb forces captured the eastern town of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, and over the following days massacred thousands in Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
 
The killing came shortly before the end of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war between its Croats, Muslims and Serbs that claimed some 100,000 lives.
 
The massacre remains divisive at an international level even 20 years later -- on July 7 the UN Security Council was forced to delay a vote on a draft resolution recognising what happened in Srebrenica as genocide after Russia threatened to veto the text.
 
And for Serbs, while a recent poll showed 54 percent do not question the crime's brutality, an overwhelming majority -- 70 percent of those asked -- still deny it was genocide.
 
Local politicians "only take into account public opinion so as to not lose voters and, without mentioning the word genocide, use descriptions that say the same thing," analyst Aleksandar Popov said.
 
In 2010, then Serbian president Boris Tadic went to Srebrenica to pay homage to the victims without saying the key word.
 
That same year the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution condemning...