Al Jazeera & The Associated Press – 2013-04-11 01:48:54
http://www.aljazeera.com/video/americas/2013/04/2013410235950576226.html
US Boycotts UN International Justice Meeting
James Bays / Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor.
UNITED NATIONS (April 11, 2013) — The US is boycotting a meeting on the subject of international justice at the UN. It says the meeting is a bid by Serbia to divert attention from its role in the Balkan wars.
US Boycotts UN Meeting on International Justice
Edith M. Lederer / Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS (April 11, 2013) — The United States, Canada and Jordan boycotted a meeting Wednesday on international criminal justice organized by the Serbian president of the General Assembly because it didn’t include Bosnia’s war victims and attacked the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
To protest the victims’ exclusion, Jordan’s UN Ambassador Prince Zeid al Hussein and Liechtenstein’s UN ambassador Christian Wenewaser hosted a news conference for two victims groups — the Mothers of Srebrenica and the Association of Witnesses and Survivors of Genocide — while assembly president Vuk Jeremic, Serbia’s former foreign minister, presided over the assembly meeting.
Munira Subasic, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica, who lost 22 close family members in the 1995 massacre by Bosnian Serbs, said she was allowed into the assembly meeting as “a silent observer,” but felt the same way she did after losing her husband, sons and other loved ones — “I had no right to anything.”
She listened as Serbia’s ultranationalist President Tomislav Nikolic, the main speaker, criticized the Yugoslav tribunal. She believed that Mr. Nikolic was denying the genocide in Srebrenica, so she said she put on a T-shirt she had brought as a gift for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that said: “Justice Is Slow But It’s Reachable.”
“All of a sudden I was surrounded by security of Vuk Jeremic” and escorted out of the conference room, Ms. Subasic said.
She said the United Nations, which had failed to protect the men and boys of Srebrenica, appeared not to learn from its past, and she urged her own descendants and people everywhere to learn from the past “and love other people and don’t hate anyone.”
In a lengthy speech soon after, Serbia’s Mr. Nikolic protested against the “lynch-mobbing of Serbia” and accused the Yugoslav tribunal of “selective justice,” by seeking to punish Serbs while overlooking the crimes of Bosnians and Croats.
Jordan’s Prince Zeid, who was a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia and served from 2002 to 2005 as the first president of the Assembly of States Parties for the International Criminal Court, said Tuesday that he was encouraging other countries in the 193-nation General Assembly to boycott the meeting.
He expressed “indignation” at the way Mr. Jeremic used his position and the General Assembly session on “the Role of International Justice in Reconciliation” to launch “an unmerited attack by the Serbian Radical Party against the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.”
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