In a telephone statement for the Belgrade-based newspaper Politika, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office several times repeated that these events were “not the same,” and that it is “horrible to make such comparisons.”

“I wish the Nazis moved aside Jewish women and children before their bloody rampage, instead of murdering them, but that, as we know, did not happen. Rwanda and the Holocaust are also not the same, although the crimes committed in Rwanda are much more similar to the Holocaust than what happened in Srebrenica. However, it’s still not the same. Above all, neither Rwanda nor Srebrenica were about industrial mass murder that was committed in the Holocaust,” Zuroff has been quoted as saying by the daily.

He did not wish to comment on a draft British resolution on Srebrenica, that should be tabled at the UN Security Council in July.

Efraim Zuroff, one of the best known Nazi hunters, says it is “absurd” to compare the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide with the crimes committed in Srebrenica.

Asked to comment on the part that condemns “any denial of the genocide in Srebrenica,” Zuroff said he was “not sure that what happened in Srebrenica was genocide.”

“As far as I know, what happened there is not the description or the definition of genocide. I think the decision to call it genocide was made for political reasons. Obviously a tragedy occurred, innocent people lost their lives and their memory should be preserved,” he said.

Zuroff added that political reasons took precedence when the time came to take a stand toward the enormous scale of suffering in Rwanda, where some 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi people were murdered from April until June 1994.

“Although that was genocide, Bill Clinton did not wish to call it genocide for political reasons, he did not want to be forced to do something about it,” Zuroff concluded.