A criminal complaint has been filed on Wednesday against a journalist with the Serbian news agency Tanjug and his denial that genocide had been committed after the 1995 fall of Srebrenica in Bosnia during his interview with Bosnia and Herzegovina Presidency chairman, Zeljko Komsic, on Tuesday. 

The complaint against Tanjug’s reporter Marko Trosic has been filed by the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada (IGC) a Bosniak lobbyist group which said on Wednesday they lodged a complaint with Bosnian prosecutors based on a new law imposed in July by the former High Representative for Bosnia, Valentin Inzko.

The law made it a criminal offence to deny war crimes, including the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, in which Bosnian Serb forces massacred thousands of ethnic Bosniak men and boys following the fall of the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia. International institutions, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Western countries, as well as official policy in Bosnia, all described the event as genocide.

On the other hand, Bosnian Serb leaders traditionally reject this label and often downplay war crimes committed by Bosnian Serb forces during the war. Inzko’s law, imposed at the very end of his term in Bosnia, includes penalties of six months to five years in prison for genocide denial. To date, no one has been prosecuted under the new law.

Trosic had interviewed Komsic on Tuesday, and the conversation developed into a debate on whether genocide had been committed in Srebrenica. Komsic insisted that this was clearly established in court rulings, while Trosic countered by saying he disagreed with them and that he believed “a horrible crime” was committed, but not exactly genocide.

“Then you will have to do this interview with someone else,” Komsic replied, before getting up and leaving the televised interview.