ISRAEL HAS NEVER ACCEPTED TERM GENOCIDE IN RELATION TO SREBRENICA

BELGRADE, JULY 27 /SRNA/ - The Ambassador of Israel to Serbia, Yahel Vilan, has said that Israel would have voted for a resolution on Srebrenica at the UN if it considered that genocide occurred there.

"We have never accepted the term genocide in relation to what happened in Srebrenica," Vilan emphasized. He told Tanjug that a very serious war crime definitely occurred there, but from an Israeli perspective, it does not constitute genocide. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Sufferings of all the Peoples in the Srebrenica Region between 1992 and 1995, led by prominent Israeli historian and Holocaust expert Gideon Greif, concluded that neither a single act of genocide nor genocide as a whole occurred in Srebrenica. The commission, consisting of 10 world experts, found that the Serbs never had such a plan either in Srebrenica or anywhere else. The UN General Assembly passed an anti-Serb resolution on Srebrenica, which was supported by 84 out of 193 UN member states. In the vote, 87 states were either against or abstained, while 22 countries did not vote, making a total of 109 countries that did not support the controversial document.