MOSCOW, July 9. /TASS/. Adoption of the UN Security Council’s resolution on the 20th anniversary of events in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica might have set the Balkans ablaze, Russia’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Vasily Likhachov, who is a member of the State Duma committee for the CIS and Eurasian integration told TASS.
On Wednesday, Russia vetoed the UN Security Council resolution drafted by Britain, which qualified the killing of about 8,000 Bosnian Moslems in the Srebrenica enclave as an act of genocide and said denial of the fact put up an obstacle to reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A total of ten member-states of the Security Council voted for the resolution and another four countries — Angola, Venezuela, China, and Nigeria — abstained from voting.
"I think the adoption of that resolution, quite unstable one in terms of its political aftermaths, would have furnished the Americans with an opportunity to conduct the line at a new surge of the Bosnian conflict and could have set developments throughout Balkans ablaze," Likhachov believes.
He said Russia’s position was quite appropriate and working towards stabilization in the region.
"Russia’s stance is called upon to stabilize the situation," Likhachov said. "The problems pertaining to history cannot be resolved at watersheds or through a collision of interests of different ethnic groups. They only way to solve them is in a quiet atmosphere of mutual respect and with due understanding of a common future these peoples will have."
On July 11, 1995, the forces of Bosnian Serbs killed about 8,000 male Moslems in Srebrenica.
The Serbian side does not deny the fact of the crime but it says the purges came as a response to premeditated extermination of the ethnic Serb populations by Bosnian Moslem extremists in the previous phases of the civil war.