The Bosnian Serb government won praise from a western envoy today for its "dramatic U-turn" in acknowledging 7,800 Muslims were killed by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995.
But deputy international envoy Mr Bernard Fassier added the slaughter must now be fully investigated and those responsible prosecuted.
"A fresh large-scale process of exhuming and identifying victims must be started and properly funded," Mr Fassier said in the first official reaction from the office of peace envoy Mr Paddy Ashdown to a report released last month on the Srebrenica.
"There must be full and thorough investigations and prosecutions of those responsible," Mr Fassier added. A Bosnian Serb government panel completed a report on Srebrenica last month, a year after Bosnia's top human rights court and international peace envoy had ordered it to fully investigate the atrocity.
It followed two earlier reports which were widely condemned for playing down the scope and nature of events in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces killed thousands of Muslim men and boys in the three-day rampage in the eastern town.
Mr Fassier praised the government for admitting responsibility for the deliberate, large-scale atrocities in Srebrenica - seen as Europe's worst since World War Two - and qualified by the Hague tribunal as genocide.
"The Republika Srpska (RS) government's conclusions... represent a dramatic U-turn from the RS's initial position of denial, obfuscation and concealment," Mr Fassier said. The Constitutional Court's human rights chamber today assessed the report as "largely positive" but added that much needs to be done to fully complete the process