PM Davutoğlu to attend ceremonies in Srebrenica next month

ANKARA

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (C). AFP Photo

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu will pay a one-day visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina next month to attend memorial ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica, in which Bosnian Serbs killed nearly 8,000 Muslims during the 1992-95 war.

While in Sarajevo on July 11, Davutoğlu plans to hold bilateral talks with leaders from several countries on the sidelines of the ceremonies, sources from the Prime Ministry told state-run Anadolu Agency, without citing the names of those leaders.

Davutoğlu plans to proceed to the eastern Bosnian town of Zepa following the ceremonies in order to join families of the victims there, the agency said.

In July 1995, Bosnian Serbs rounded up Srebrenica men and boys after taking control of the town in an offensive. They killed most of them in just a few days, later burying their bodies in mass graves around the town.

The U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has ruled that the massacre -- the worst mass killing on European soil since World War II -- constituted genocide, a term that the Bosnian Serbs still dispute and that Serbia studiously avoids.

More than 100,000 people died during the Bosnian war and millions were left homeless.