Belgrade: Hardline Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who has long denied the 1995 genocide of Srebrenica Muslims, in a surprise move Thursday paid his respects to the victims at a memorial in the ill-fated town.
"It is true that a crime was committed here and I regret all the victims," local media reported Dodik as saying at the memorial.
"However, the fact is also that those events are too politicised."
Dodik, accompanied by Muslim mayor of Srebrenica, Camil Durakovic, laid a wreath in front of the monument at the cemetery where thousands of victims are buried.
Bosnian Serb forces killed almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys after they captured the eastern town on July 11, 1995, and dumped their bodies in mass graves.
The Srebrenica massacre was the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, and was ruled to be genocide by two international courts.
The head of an association of massacre survivors hailed Dodik`s move.
"This is a good thing. His conciousness awoke twenty years on," Munira Subasic told AFP.
"He does not have to say the word `genocide` but when paying respects in front of the white graves, which speak for themselves, he actually accepts it."
Dodik, president of the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska which along with the Muslim-Croat Federation have made up the country since its 1992-1995 war, is known for his nationalist rhetoric.
In 2010 he said that Bosnian Serbs would never accept that the massacre was genocide. He also minimised the number of the victims, speaking of some 3,500 killed people.
Bosnia`s 1992-1995 war between its Muslims, Croats and Serbs claimed some 100,000 lives and uprooted 2.2 million people.
