Attack on Serbia PM mars Srebrenica massacre anniversary

An angry crowd disrupted a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in Bosnia, hurling stones at Serbia's premier and forcing him to flee the event marking Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic had just laid a flower at a monument for the thousands of victims identified and buried there when the crowd started chanting 'Allahu Akbar' (God is Great) and throwing stones, forcing the Serbian leader to run for cover shielded by his bodyguards.
Serbia's Tanjug state-run news agency said Vucic was hit on the head by a stone and had his glasses broken.

Vucic, whose country backed Bosnian Serbs during and after the 1990s inter-ethnic war in Bosnia, was among numerous dignitaries, including former US president Bill Clinton, and tens of thousands of people attending the commemoration in the eastern Bosnian town.
Shortly before arriving, Vucic condemned the "monstrous crime" in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces who captured Srebrenica in July 1995, near the end of the war.
Serbia quickly reacted to the incident, calling the stone-throwing in neighbouring Bosnia an attack against the country.

"It is an attack not only against Vucic but against all of Serbia and its policy of peace and regional cooperation," Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said in a statement.

Serbian and Bosnian Serb politicians have long denied the extent of the killing in Srebrenica, although two international tribunals have described the bloodshed as genocide -- a massive killing not seen since the German Nazi regime and its concentration camps during World War ii.
In 1995 Srebrenica was supposedly a UN-protected "safe haven" but the Bosnian Serb forces led by Ratko Mladic brushed aside the lightly armed Dutch UN peacekeepers.
The slaughter was followed a few months later by the Dayton peace deal, brokered by the Clinton administration, which ended the 1992-1995 conflict which cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 people.