"Serbian officials' relationship towards this crime is very important and we will follow with particular attention the Serbian president's work on reconciliation in the region," Belgrade's Danas daily quoted Kacin as saying in its issue of Thursday.
He said Nikolic's statement could give cause for concern but that every state official stepping into a new office should be given a certain time to deliver the goods. "I think the right signal would be if Nikolic first visited the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, and not Banja Luka (in Bosnia's Serb entity) at the very beginning of his term."
Kacin recalled that Nikolic would meet in Brussels on June 14 with European Council President Herman van Rompuy, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton, and that one of the topics at the Commission would be regional reconciliation and Nikolic's relationship towards Srebrenica.
Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen has told Belgrade's Vecernje Novosti daily that the European Union wants an honest and direct dialogue with Nikolic and that it resolutely rejects any attempt to rewrite history with claims that there was no genocide in Srebrenica.
In a recent interview with Montenegrin television, Nikolic said, "There was no genocide in Srebrenica. What happened in Srebrenica was a mass crime committed by some members of the Serb people who should be found, brought to justice and punished," ignoring the fact that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice described the Srebrenica atrocities as genocide.
Nikolic's negation of the genocide has been condemned by the EU, the international community's High Representative to Bosnia, Valentin Inzko, Bosnian Presidency Chairman Bakir Izetbegovic, and others.