BECKENHAM MP Colonel Bob Stewart has shared his ‘horrendous’ personal experience of genocide in a Holocaust Memorial Day debate.
The former United Nations Commander of British Forces spoke about the horrors of the Bosnian war in the House of Commons.
He recollected a particular day of fighting in Bosnia in April 1993 when he discovered the Ahmci massacre and ordered a mass grave to be dug for more than 100 civilians.
Col Stewart said: "It was particularly awful when the Bosnian Croats, the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Serbs went against one another.
"It was described by the United Nations as genocide, and I think one could actually call it a holocaust.
"We found bodies—what was left of them. I found one whole family in the cellar: a mother, another woman, three or four babies burned to death, a father, and on the stairs outside, probably a teenage boy."
Col Stewart added: "We found what remained of them because they had hopefully been shot—I say hopefully because otherwise they had been burned before they died. It was horrendous."
The Beckenham MP also testified in six war crimes trials at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague.
Holocaust Memorial Day took place last Sunday (Jan 27). For more information, visit hmd.org.uk/
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