WASHINGTON D.C. (BNO NEWS) – President Barack Obama designated on Wednesday a Presidential Delegation that will travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina to attend the ceremony commemorating the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide next Sunday.

The delegation will be led by Charles English, the U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina. He will be joined by Stephen Rapp, Ambassador-at-Large for war crime issues, and Samantha Power, the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.

From July 11 to July 22, 1995, 8,372 Muslim Bosniak men and boys were systematically murdered by the Bosnian Serb army in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War.

In 1993, the United Nations (UN) declared Srebrenica as a safe area under the UN protection. The UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) allocated a 400 contingent of armed Dutch peacekeepers. However the UNPROFOR was unable to prevent and stop the massacre.

The Army of the Republika Srpska, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica. They separated all the males from their families and proceeded to murder them. They also expelled around 25,000 to 30,000 people in a massive ethnic cleansing campaign.

The Srebrenica genocide is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. So far, 6,186 victims have been identified from 70 mass graves through DNA analysis.

(Copyright 2010 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: sales@bnonews.com.)