Srebrenica - "People are not little stones"

Today is the anniversary of the most horrific atrocity on European soil in my lifetime, namely the genocide at Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia.

In July 1995 more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed, and 25,000-30,000 refugees were "ethnically cleansed" in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska under the command of General Ratko Mladić.

The presiding judge at the Hague said, "The Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica... They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity".

The Srebrenica massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. It was and remains a shameful stain on the conscience of Europe.

We must never allow such barbarity to occur again, and by strengthening the European Union and embedding democracy across Europe, we will go a long way to achieving this goal.