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Russia has vetoed a British-drafted Security Council Resolution that would condemn the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica as a "crime of genocide." The vote was 10-1 with four abstentions. Angola, China, Nigeria and Venezuela - abstained from the vote. This comes on the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. In 1995 the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a UN-declared safe area, came under attack by forces lead by the Bosnian Serb commander, Ratko Mladić. During a few days in early July, more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were executed by the Serbs. The rest of the town’s women and children were driven out. The same year, Human Rights watch wrote:
The fall of the town of Srebrenica and its environs to Bosnian Serb forces in early July 1995 made a mockery of the international community’s professed commitment to safeguard regions it declared to be "safe areas" and placed under United Nations protection in 1993. United Nations peacekeeping officials were unwilling to heed requests for support from their own forces stationed within the enclave, thus allowing Bosnian Serb forces to easily overrun of hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilian men and boys and to terrorize, rape, beat, execute, rob and otherwise abuse civilians being deported from the area.
The Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik told local media late on Tuesday: “The text of the resolution is so fundamentally bad, that it cannot be corrected. Russia is acting in accordance with the talks we had with them.” Serbian Prime Minster Aleksandar Vucic said the British resolution opened fresh divisions and “pushed us into the trenches of hatred.”
The denial of the genocide comes despite the fact that the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in 2004 and the International Court of Justice in 2007, determined that the mass killings at Srebrenica were an act of genocide.
This vote represents a step backwards for the Security Council after it unanimously adopted a resolution (2150) on the Rwandan genocide last year. In 1994, in the space of 100 days 800,000 people were killed, of which, a report by Human Rights Watch suggest some 44 percent were children under the age of fifteen. The same year, the Security Council failed to identify the massacre in Rwanda as genocide, as states such as the US and the UK refused to accept the factual situation and the legal consequences of such a classification. Resolution 2150 condemned “without reservation any denial of this Genocide” and urged “Member States to develop educational programmes that will inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Genocide in order to help prevent future genocides.”
The denial of the Srebrenica genocide is a major blow to the healing process under way in Bosnia, where only now, after 20 years are some victims of the genocide against Bosnian Muslims, claiming compensation. Yet coming at a time of widespread armed conflict, with increasing evidence of grave breaches in many States; the falure of this resolution suggest the formation of a dangerous attitude among states in the Security Council; towards taking action against international crimes under its commitments to the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect.