Bosnia Muslim leader challenges Serbia to repent

Reuters News

SARAJEVO, April 14 (Reuters) - The spiritual leader of Bosnia's Muslim majority challenged the Serbian president on Wednesday to apologise unreservedly for wartime Bosnian Serb atrocities and launch a process of reconciliation.

In an interview with Reuters a day after Serbian President Boris Tadic visited Bosnia to boost business ties, Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric charged that Belgrade was still trying to deceive the world with false words and empty gestures.

At Tadic's initiative, the Serbian parliament last month passed a resolution condemning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims but stopped short of a direct apology and did not call the killings genocide.

"By denial of genocide and ridiculing the victims of genocide, they are preparing for a second genocide," Ceric told Reuters in an interview.

"My message to the European Union is: don't allow again that tears of humanity from Belgrade deceive you," he said. Serbia had not changed at all, he contended, and "what Belgrade is doing with Tadic is just deception".

"He is sincere of course, and I am very happy," Ceric said.

He said Josipovic had telephoned to invite him to accompany the president on Thursday to the site of a 1993 Bosnian Croat atrocity against Bosnian Muslims, and he would attend along with Bosnia's top Roman Catholic prelate, Cardinal Vinko Puljic.

Asked whether he would welcome a similar phone call from Tadic, Ceric said: "I am waiting for this call and I will be the happiest person in the world to receive such a call from the president of Serbia and to open this process of Bosnian-Serbian dialogue that would lead to reconciliation."

However, he said Belgrade must meet two conditions: a clear and unequivocal condemnation of genocide, apologising to the victims "with no buts"; and a public promise to the world "that they will not repeat genocide against anyone in the Balkans".

Serbia argues that it was not directly responsible for atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-95 Bosnia war, and that other nations must recognise war crimes committed against Serbs.

The mufti, widely respected for promoting a moderate brand of Islam in Europe and for his commitment to interfaith dialogue with Christians and Jews, said he had visited Tadic in Belgrade to discuss launching a civil society dialogue on reconciliation.

But he said Belgrade had only begun to move because it was politically isolated after Croatia agreed to make July 11, the date of the Srebrenica massacre, a day of remembrance, and fellow former Yugoslav republics Montenegro and Macedonia had followed suit.

Without a European Parliament resolution last year overwhelmingly condemning the massacre as an act of genocide and naming the Bosnian Serb leaders as responsible, the Belgrade parliament would not have put it on the agenda, he argued.

"Serbia was put in a corner to do it," Ceric said.