ZAGREB, 11 December, 2021 - Member of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Parliament Enver Bijedić said on Friday he had filed a criminal report against Croatian President Zoran Milanović for making statements questioning the scale of the Srebrenica genocide.
Bijedić is the leader of a small non-parliamentary party called the BiH Social Democrats and he has reported Milanović to the BiH prosecutorial authorities based on amendments to the Criminal Code imposed in late July by former High Representative Valentin Inzko to outlaw the denial of all war crimes confirmed by court rulings.
Bijedić found the grounds for reporting Milanović in his statement that "not every genocide is the same", which he made in a comment on the decision by the leader of the BiH Croat HDZ party, Dragan Čović, to support, with other HDZ BiH deputies in the BiH Parliament's House of Peoples, a proposal by Serb deputies to repeal the law imposed by Inzko.
"On 3 December 2021 Milanović continued in an even more scandalous tone, trying to downplay the Srebrenica genocide by comparing it to the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide," Bijedić says in a statement.
The politician believes Milanović's statements caused unrest and additional interethnic intolerance among BiH citizens.
Under the amended Criminal Code of 28 July, anyone who publicly condones, denies, grossly downplays or tries to justify the crime of genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime determined by a final court ruling faces a sentence ranging from six months to five years in prison.
