serb Archives

Turkey Stops Serb Leader from Traveling to Armenia

April 22, 2015 by administrator

SARAJEVO (Daily Star)—Turkish authorities on Wednesday stopped Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik’s airplane from flying over Turkish territory, preventing him from attending a ceremony to mark the centenary of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan, Dodik’s office reports.

“Although all authorizations for this flight had been obtained, Turkish authorities did not allow the flight over their territory,” Dodik’s cabinet said in a statement to the Daily Star of Lebanon.

The plane carrying the president of Republika Srpska, a Serb-run entity of Bosnia, returned to his capital Banja Luka after spending four and a half hours at an airport in eastern Bulgaria, waiting in vain for authorization to fly over Turkish territory, the statement said.

Hundreds of thousands are expected to flock to genocide memorial in Armenia’s capital Yerevan on Friday to mark the start of a tragedy that still stirs deep divisions.

Ex-Soviet Armenia and the huge Armenian diaspora worldwide have battled for decades to get the World War I massacres at the hands of Ottoman forces between 1915 and 1918 recognized as a genocide. But Turkey rejects the term or any responsibility for crimes against humanity and has fought against the recognition of the Armenian Genocide.

French President Francois Hollande and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are among those expected to attend Friday’s ceremonies.

Earlier this month Dodik submitted to the Republika Srpska’s parliament a declaration recognizing the Armenian Genocide.

The legislative body will likely adopt the declaration in the coming days.

But Bosnian Muslim political leaders, who view Turkey as their main international ally, have criticized the initiative.

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Serb Republic President wants to promptly recognize #ArmenianGenocide

April 17, 2015 by administrator

Serb Republic President Milorad Dodik directed to the Parliament the text of a “Statement on Recognition of Armenian Genocide in 1915-17,” reports Radio and Television of Vojvodina (RTV), citing Dodik’s office website. The President proposed to adopt the statement during the coming session.

The statement reads:

“The Serb nation of the Serb Republic, as a freedom-loving nation, as well as a nation, which lost one third of its working population and a huge amount of natural and mineral resources during the World War I, expresses its solidarity with the efforts of the Armenian nation and supports it in its struggle for the recognition of historic justice and its terming as genocide, as an extermination perpetrated against Armenians during the fall of the Ottoman Empire.”

The statement mentions that the Serb Republic needs to “carry out work on the protection of human rights and international criminal law, underscore that a crime against humanity has no statute of limitations, and contribute to the struggle against the Genocide denial.”

Another house belonging to Serb returnees set on fire

October 25, 2014 by administrator

Source: Beta

ISTOK — The coordinator in the Office for Communities in the municipality of Istok in Kosovo has said that a house belonging to a Serb returnee had been set on fire.

Dragan Repanović said that the house, belonging to late Radosav Pantić, was empty at the time the incident occurred, and that two rooms burned down.

This is the second Serb returnee home in the region of Istok and Klina in Kosovo that has come under attack in this way in the past several days.

“A neighbor of the Pantić family, an Albanian, told the police that somebody broke into the house of late Pantić last night (Tuesday) around 21:00 hours, in the settlement of Ljug in Istok, and that the house was then set on fire. Firefighters arrived and put out the fire,” said Repanović.