The irony of the date is not lost on me--and could perhaps have been intentional? Could the lawyers not have known what he was going to say? What better way to fan the flames?
A defence witness at the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic denied on Monday that Bosnian Serb forces slaughtered 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica 10 years ago.
Bozidar Delic, a retired Yugoslav army general..."That's your observation. I do not accept that," Delic told the court. "I accept that two to three thousand Serbs were killed in the Srebrenica area and several thousand Muslims, but most of them were killed in fighting."
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L11306288.htm

Glad to see that the Brits can remain objective and non-inflammatory in their language:
"What's all the fuss about?" shrugged the young Srebrenica Serb yesterday as the town swelled with Bosnian mourners...
"This is all just a publicity stunt," snorted Mando, 28. "Sure, people were killed, but why make all this noise? There were 3,600 Serbs killed here. Some say 8,000 Muslims were killed, that it was genocide. But the figures are exaggerated. No one knows the truth. That's a game for kids. All this fuss just gives me a sore head."
Like many of the Serbs of Srebrenica, Mando still cannot face the truth about his small home town a decade after the Serbs murdered up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males within a week in what many see as the gravest political massacre in Europe in the second half of the 20th century...
In what western diplomats in the Serbian capital described as a disgrace, the Serbian parliament was unable to agree on a statement condemning the crime.
Last week the government of prime minister Vojislav Kostunica finally released a statement deploring war crimes and equating the Srebrenica massacre with the killings of Serbs in the region during the Bosnian war.
The aim was not to excuse or justify Srebrenica, but to relativise and belittle a crime which judges in The Hague have classified as genocide, the sole such event in the Yugoslav wars of the 90s to warrant that category.
"Ach, genocide," snorts Mando. "Who knows?"
At the weekend in Belgrade thousands of Serbs gathered in a conference hall to watch a film called The Truth with a Wagner soundtrack and to claim that the Serbs were the real victims. A Belgrade newspaper recently published a 16-page supplement entitled The Book of the Dead, listing 3,287 Serbs from the Srebrenica region who died during the Bosnian war.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,2763,1525853,00.html?gusrc=rss

Various articles about the commemoration:
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the massacre as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica — Europe's worst atrocity since World War II. And although the anniversary finds most of Serbia, in whose name it was committed, still avoiding a true accounting of was perpetrated at Srebrenica and by whom, there are encouraging signs that the façade of denial may have suffered irreparable cracks.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1081303,00.html?promoid=rss_top

"When condemning crimes, it is of decisive importance not to distinguish between innocent victims according to their nationality or faith. The Serbian government strongly condemns all war crimes committed during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia."

In this recent statement, Belgrade did not single out the Srebrenica massacre as the worst war crime committed on European soil since the end of World War II as many had hoped. Instead, it called it a "serious crime" along with atrocities against ethnic Serbs during the war.

It's a sign that the Balkan country is still struggling to come to terms with its past despite recent signs that the war's worst criminals might finally be brought to justice.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1644313,00.html

Interesting, isn't it, that on a day meant to commemorate the victims of Srebrenica, all the press seemed able to do was talk about the perpetrators...

The NYT published a pitifully short article--the event wasn't even worthy of a major headline. The possibility of getting North Korea to the bargaining table and yet more information about the Israeli wall were apparently more important stories than the 10-year anniversary. Funny, isn't it? Srebrenica is big news whenever the West wants to put it to the Serbs, but invisible when it comes time for someone else to pay the piper....here's the link
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/international/europe/12bosnia.html?

That's enough for today--let's see who cares about Srebrenica, or Bosnia, or Serbia, for that matter, tomorrow. No fancy anniversaries to celebrate.