Prime Minister Imran Khan on Saturday said he feared a massacre similar to the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica could happen in Indian occupied Kashmir and urged the international community to take notice and prevent it from happening.
Speaking on the 25th anniversary of the massacre, the premier said he still remembered when the genocide had taken place.
“We were shocked and appalled how this massacre was allowed to happen in a United Nations safe haven. I still feel shock [over] how such a thing could have been allowed by the world community.”
Khan said it was important to learn lessons from the massacre and talked about apprehensions regarding occupied Kashmir.
“We see problems for the people of Kashmir. 800,000 troops have besieged eight million people of Kashmir. We are afraid that such a thing might happen there as well.”
He urged the world community to take notice and never allow such massacres to happen again.
“From the people of Pakistan I send my salam and best wishes to the people of Bosnia,” the premier said.
Echoing remarks made by the prime minister, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that the world had a “collective responsibility to ensure that history is not repeated”.
In a tweet, Qureshi said that what was happening in occupied Kashmir and Palestine was “chillingly similar” to the 1995 massacre.
However, the outgunned peacekeepers watched helplessly as Serb troops took around 2,000 men and boys from the compound for execution while bussing the women and girls to Bosnian government-held territory. Meanwhile, in the woods around Srebrenica, Serb soldiers hunted the fleeing Bosniaks, as Bosnian Muslims are otherwise known, killing them one by one.
The killers sought to hide evidence of the genocide, piling most of the bodies into hastily made mass graves, which they subsequently dug up with bulldozers and scattered the bodies across numerous burial sites.
In the years since, bodies have been unearthed and the victims identified through DNA testing. About 1,000 victims remain to be found.
A special UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague and courts in the Balkans have sentenced close to 50 Bosnian Serbs, including their top civilian war-time leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, to more than 700 years in prison for Srebrenica crimes