Those who committed genocide at Srebrenica in 1995 vented their hatred on the victims and “on all their fellow citizens who seek to live in solidarity and justice,” High Representative and EU Special Representative Valentin Inzko said today.

Speaking at the annual remembrance ceremony in Potocari the HR/EUSR said that the hatred spread by war criminals affected everyone in Bosnia and Herzegovina but that it had been repudiated.

“Good is not passive in the face of evil. It actively rejects evil. Society is not helpless. Society can actively and decisively advance an alternative to evil, an antidote to evil – a reality built on justice.

“Nothing can be built on genocide, these are bad foundations” he said. “Nothing can be protected by genocide. Hatred – and everything that flows from it – is in the end self-defeating.”

While there may still be some “who insist that killers are not killers, victims are not victims, the dead are not the dead,” the HR/EUSR said, “this perverse and obtuse denial – in the face of incontrovertible evidence – will be worn away by truth. Truth will prevail – even among those who stubbornly hide from it.”

He said the courts, including the Hague Tribunal, will ensure that justice is done.

“The men who murdered here – and those who directed them, some of them are now prisoners in the Hague – were prisoners of evil, but they have not spread that evil to the rest of us,” the HR/EUSR said. “The collective community of Bosnia and Herzegovina today repudiates the crime and the criminals.”

He said the International Community will continue to work with the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina “in solidarity with all citizens who want nothing of hatred, who want to live in peace and justice,” and it will do this, “confident that good, not evil, will prevail.”

The full text of the HR/EUSR’s speech can be accessed at www.ohr.int and www.europa.ba