* Ban Ki-moon: "I make a plea to the world"
* UN chief addresses Bosnian parliament
* Recalls UN's failure to halt 1995 Srebrenica massacre
SARAJEVO, July 25 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon called on world powers on Wednesday to urgently unite to
end the bloodshed in Syria, recalling the inertia of the United
Nations in 1995 as genocide occurred in the Bosnian town of
Srebrenica.
Wrapping up a week-long tour of the countries carved from
old federal Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Ban told the Bosnian
parliament he was making a plea to the world.
In Srebrenica, he said, "the United Nations did not live up
to its responsibility. The international community failed in
preventing the genocide that unfolded. Too many men and boys
died in Srebrenica - needlessly, savagely."
"That is why, here in the heart of a healing Bosnia and
Herzegovina, I make a plea to the world: do not delay. Come
together. Act. Act now to stop the slaughter in Syria."
As he spoke, the Syrian army was turning its forces on the
country's second city of Aleppo, pounding rebels with artillery
and attack helicopters, opposition activists said, in the 16th
month of an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
The U.N. Security Council, divided between Western powers on
one side and Russia and China on the other, has proved helpless
in halting a conflict in which activists say at least 18,000
people have been killed.
Around 100,000 died in Bosnia's 1992-95 war, as divided
world powers flinched at intervening in what they saw as a
complex ethnic conflict.
They only acted in the wake of the July 1995 massacre in
Srebrenica, when Dutch U.N. peacekeepers abandoned what had been
designated a U.N. safe haven to advancing Bosnian Serb forces,
who killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys and bulldozed their corpses
into pits.
The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague said the crime,
the worst massacre on European soil since World War Two,
constituted genocide. Bosnia remains deeply divided, still
scarred by ethnic cleansing.
"The United Nations is doing all that we can," Ban said of
its efforts in Syria. "But action - meaningful action - will
take the concerted efforts of the international community.
Without unity, there will be more bloodshed. Without unity, more
innocents will die."
(Editing by Matt Robinson and Mark Heinrich)