The only officials in attendance were Montenegro Deputy Parliament Speaker Rifat Rastoder and Serbian Agriculture Minister Ivana Dulic Markovic, who underlined she came only on her own behalf.
Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Fund, which organised the conference in association with the Hague war crimes tribunal's office in Belgrade, criticised a document condemning all crimes committed during the wars in the ex-Yugoslavia which Serbian MPs are expected to discuss soon.
Kandic said that by adopting the document, the authorities would show they were not capable of doing anything to clearly condemn the crime in eastern Bosnia's Srebrenica, where Serb troops killed over 7,000 Muslims in July 1995.
She said the recent discovery of a video showing the killing of six Srebrenica residents by the Scorpions unit, which operated within the Serbian Interior Ministry, had broken Serbia's 10-year silence about Srebrenica. She added, however, that institutions were still willing to keep good relations with forces from the times of the Slobodan Milosevic regime.
Kandic said the participants in the conference wanted to state clearly that there could no longer be justification for claiming that no one knew the whereabouts of Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. She said they must be arrested, but added that the political elite and not nongovernmental organisations should lead the way in facing the past. She said it was the only way to establish the rule of law and do justice to the victims.
Attending the conference were representatives of the Hague tribunal, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and numerous NGOs. Tight security was provided around the Sava Centre building, where the conference took place, following announcements that representatives of some right-wing associations denying the war crime at Srebrenica might rally around the building.