UN special adviser on genocide warns war is worsening tensions elsewhere
Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the United Nations' special adviser for the prevention of genocide, said the scenes of dead civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha indicate "hundreds of victims [were] deliberately targeted, which point to very serious signs of possible commission of war crimes."
![](https://s.abcnews.com/images/International/bucha-scene-01-ap-jef-220404_1649175037740_hpMain.jpg)
Wairimu Nderitu in a statement said Russia's war is exacerbating existing tensions elsewhere, particularly in the western Balkans, where Bosnian Muslims were killed in the Srebrenica genocide less than 30 years ago.
"In the last six weeks, the conflict in Ukraine has deteriorated some of these dynamics," she said. "Open vindication of violence against members of one national group, appeal to religion as a source of legitimacy for violence, or alignment of national pursuits to the cause of warrying parties in the Ukraine conflict do not only constitutes symptoms of insufficient healing in a region where conflict was present -- they are also signs that the risk of recurrence is real and serious."
Tensions in Bosnia were increasing long before the war, despite efforts from a U.S.-brokered peace deal to patch up the wounds of war and genocide. Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has threatened to tear apart the country's ethnically-divided federal institutions and the country itself, which has brought him under tighter U.S. sanctions.
Along with protests from Peru to Sri Lanka over fuel and food prices, and humanitarian crises in Yemen and Afghanistan with funding and food aid drying up, it's another reminder of how Russia's war is sending shockwaves around the world.
-ABC News' Conor Finnegan