Bosnian Serbs will never accept that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslims was genocide, Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik told a Belgrade daily in an interview published Tuesday.
"We cannot and will never accept qualifying that event as a genocide," Dodik, who heads the Bosnian Serb entity in Bosnia, Republika Srpska, told the Vecernje Novosti newspaper.
The Srebrenica massacre is the only episode of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war to have been ruled as genocide by two international courts -- the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the UN war crimes tribunal.
Bosnian Serbs have long downplayed the Srebrenica massacre. But in a report in 2004, the Republika Srpska government acknowledged the scale of the killing and apologised to the relatives of Muslims killed in Srebrenica.
In his interview, Dodik dismissed the 2004 report, saying it was adopted "under pressure" from the international community's powerful high representative to Bosnia, and that it contained "inexact numbers".
It lists "7,000 victims and not 3,500," which Dodik described as a more likely number of dead.
"We have information that 500 people listed among the victims are alive and that over 250 people buried in the Potocari memorial (near Srebrenica) were not killed in Srebrenica," Dodik told the newspaper.
The interview with Dodik was published on the same day as the UN war crimes tribunal's chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz made his first visit to Srebrenica, where he is to meet representatives of victims' associations.
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