Belgrade offers landmark apology to Bosnia

Serbia and Montenegro President Svetozar Marovic offered a landmark apology to Bosnia yesterday for the 1992-5 war in which 200,000 died, most of them Muslims vastly outgunned by Belgrade-backed Bosnian Serbs.

He made the gesture eight years after Nato powers stopped the fighting and imposed the Dayton peace accord, and three years after the two countries - previously parts of Yugoslavia - established diplomatic relations and normalised ties.

That step came only after the ouster of Serbian nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

Milosevic is on trial at the UN tribunal in The Hague for war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. His immediate successor, Vojislav Kostunica, visited Sarajevo three times during his tenure but refused to apologise.

Marovic - on his first official visit to the city where over 10,000 people died during the 3-1/2-year siege by Serb forces - said it was time for the two neighbours to forgive.

"I want to use this opportunity to apologise for every evil or misfortune which anyone in Bosnia-Herzegovina suffered from anyone from Serbia and Montenegro," he said at a joint news conference with Bosnian presidency chairman Dragan Covic.

"These are the times when apologies are not just courtesy words - they are words of sincere intentions," he said after a meeting of the inter-state council for cooperation.

Covic said Marovic's apology was an "encouragement for the future of the two countries and for the region as a whole".

Marovic's words did not impress Sarajevans interviewed by Reuters, who said they came too late and offered no comfort for all the suffering of Sarajevo's people.