Serbian President Slammed for Meeting Bosnian War Criminal

Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic's meeting on Wednesday with former Bosnian Serb parliament speaker Momcilo Krajisnik, who has served a sentence for war crimes, was met by anger from rights groups in Bosnia and Serbia.

The meeting in Belgrade was criticised because Krajisnik was jailed in 2009 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity, including the persecution and deportation of non-Serb civilians from ten Bosnian municipalities.

Nikolic's office said in a statement that he and Krajisnik, along with another guest, the President of the Serbian National Council of Montenegro, Slobodan Remetic, discussed "ways to improve cultural ties of Serbian people in the former Yugoslavia region, with emphasis on the status and protection of human rights of Serbian people in countries in the region, as well as the protection of Cyrillic and the Serbian language".

Krajisnik, who met Nikolic in his role as head of the Association of Creators of Republika Srpska, presented Nikolic with a plaque commemorating the 1991 founding of the Bosnian Serb assembly, which then became the Republika Srpska parliament before the war broke out in 1992.

He was released in 2013 after serving two-thirds of his 20-year sentence, and received a hero's welcome when he returned to the Republika Srpska town of Pale.

The Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia said in a statement that the meeting was "a step further" in the denial of war crimes after the heightened nationalist rhetoric that accompanied celebrations on Monday to mark the Day of Republika Srpska - a Bosnian Serb public holiday that was banned by Bosnia's Constitutional Court.

It said this was a reminder that Serbia is "facing the beginning of the...