“The world is on fire. Hate prevails. Nothing has been learned.” The president of the Mothers Association of, Munira Subašić, explained a few days ago at the United Nations, desolate and rabid, which he feels when 30 years of the genocide that swept her city while committing new killings “in Palestine and in Ukraine.” The international community plays with words, according to their geopolitical conveniences, but a handful of women who lost their children, their husbands or their parents, could explain everything easy with a walk through the Potoçari memorial center, where their own are buried. Not all. Sometimes to pieces. That is the absolute evil. And that is the evil that we do not stop repeating, three decades later.
Srebrenica’s killing ended the lives of 8,372 Bosnian-Muslims men, which were killed by Serbobosnias units in what international justice described years later as “”, without half inks. It became the largest massacre in Europe after the worst atrocity in the recent memory of the old continent. In white Europe, just around the corner.
The facts
It was just five days of July. Five days for inconceivable. On July 11, 1995, the Serbobosnias forces broke into the Srebrenic enclave, in Eastern Bosnia, which since 1993 had status of “UN protected zone”, where thousands of Bosnian-Musulm civilians had taken refuge. The war whipped the ancient Yugoslavia for two years and intensified, far from solving. He reached more than 100,000 dead. Both the army and armed militians plus local war lords allied to empty and clean the area, not to leave one of its adversaries.
When the raidmore than 8,300 Bosnio-Musulmans, mostly men and boys, but also some women and babies, were killed. This massacre was the greatest crime committed during the Bosnia-Herzegovina war, which in addition to deaths was accompanied by the forced displacement of thousands of citizens, mostly women, minors, minors and the elderly. Survivors speak of massive detainees, mostly injured or turned, which were raised to the buses (more than 60), taken to forested and exterminated areas, with their hands tied, with their covered eyes. They ended in common graves, later removed so that, once the war was finished and the test collection phase began so that someone paid for the perpetrated, the bodies could not be found.
This drama was not an isolated case, but the culmination of a broader campaign of ethnic cleaning against Bosniacs (Bosnium-Muslims) in Bosnia. Therefore, the International Court of Justice (CIJ), the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (TPIY) and the Bosnia and Herzegovina court determined between 2004 and 2007 that the crimes committed in Srebernica had “genocide” character. In 2024, the UN General Assembly declared on July 11 as the day of commemoration of the Srebrenic genocide, thus reaffirming its character of genocide.
Some 300 Dutch blue helmets that had to protect the area failed to offer resistance to the irruption of the Serbian forces, which had concentrated about 15,000 soldiers around the enclave, where at that time there were about 40,000 people, many of them displaced and refugees. In 2019, that their uniformed had been responsible for this genocide by 10%, because they should have offered the Bosnian men who reached their base the possibility of taking refuge and avoiding persecution.
The blue helmets had requested NATO air support, but the attacks of the allied airplanes against the Serbian positions were suspended before the threat of the Serbobosnios to execute the Dutch captured. They yielded. They cooperated. In July 2022, the Dutch government apologized to all the victims and survivors of the genocide for “the inability of the international community to provide adequate assistance to the people of Srebernica.”
Although it has not been demonstrated or admitted without a doubt, it is very likely that the international community would know the concrete plans of ethnic cleaning in Eastern Bosnia during the summer of 1995 and tacitly accepted them as the price to be paid for the success of the peace negotiations, although perhaps no one at the international level foresaw the genocide at that time.
The executions were followed by a systematic concealment of the tests, so that the bodies were often destroyed and transferred to secondary and tertiary common graves. But more evidence was perpetrated.
Researchers from the International War Crimes Court work in a common grave with remains of more than 100 people in Pilica, on September 18, 1996.
The memory and oblivion
30 years after that barbarism, this Friday they have been buried in the cemetery of the Potocari Memorial Center the mortal remains of seven more victims, while continuing the search for the remains of more than another thousand victims of the massacre. The first formal burials, a way to restore the victims, were made in 2003, with more than 600. There are already 6,700 buried and there are several more than identified, but there are families who prefer not to bury their remains yet because they are incomplete. It works with the certainty that there will be people who, if found, can never be identified, because all their relatives were also killed and there are no living with whom to compare a simple DNA sample.
Until now, 54 people have been sentenced to prison sentences, including five life imprisonments, for crimes related to Srebrenica’s genocide. Among others, the then Serbobosnio President Radovan Karadzic and the commander of the Serbobosnio Mladic army were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The main objective of the Serbobosnias forces during the war, according to the TPIY, was to create ethnically homogeneous serbian territories in areas that claimed for an autonomous entity, which ended up being the current Republic Srpska, one of the two entities in Bosnia. The same court declared Serbia guilty of not preventing genocide and having violated the obligation to punish its authors.
According to the Memorial Center, the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina was classified by TPIY as International, given the direct participation of Serbia and the Serb-Yugoslav Jna army. In fact, two important Serbian officials were declared guilty in 2021 for their direct participation in crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The former high international representative for Bosnia Valentin Inzko prohibited in 2021 the denial of genocide through an amendment to the Criminal Code of the Balkan Country. Despite this, the denial of genocide and the glorification of war criminals persist by the authorities of the Republic Srpska and Serbia. It is today one of the most serious problems, detected by the UN Secretary General ,.
In an appearance for this anniversary, he not only assumes that his organization “failed the people of Srebrenica”, that he did not know how to stop that result of “politics, propaganda and indifference” worldwide, but denounces that, despite everything that is known today, that reality is still denied by the Serbian authorities. “I call on all member states to fulfill their shared responsibility: defend Srebrenic lessons, preserve historical truth and protect human dignity. Let’s face denial with truth and impunity with justice,” he urged. He spoke of “revisionism” and “hate crimes” up.
A crew of a Serbobosnium armed vehicle circulates through the deserted streets of Srebrenica, on July 16, 1995.
How are things
From the Dayton Peace Agreement (USA) in 1995, Bosnia is divided into two territorially the same entities, the Federation (Bosniac-Croata) and the Srpska Republic (Serbia). The two entities are connected by a weak central government and the high international representative has broad powers as guarantor of the peace agreement.
The current high representative, Christian Schmidt, accused in recent reports sent to the UN to the Serbian-Bosnias authorities-who do not recognize him-to be taking secessionist steps that endanger the peace agreement of 1995. In Serbia and in the Srpska Republic (also called the Serbia Republic of Bosnia, and the part of the country where Srebrenica is that strong relativization that Guterres spoke.
In 2010, the Serbian Parliament approved a declaration of apologies for the crime of Srebernica, but without using the word “genocide.” Since then, Serbian policy under the presidency of Aleksandar Vucic has been far from this gesture.
Vucic was a Minister of Information of the dictator Slobodan Milosevic and, on July 20, 1995, with the genocide still ongo [bosnios] They would be killed “, something for which it has not yet apologized. Today, Vucic spreads the narrative that” all sides suffered “in the Yugoslav wars, but only Serbs are not recognized as victims.
In the Srpska Republic, its president, Milorad Dodik, convened a commission led by the controversial Israeli investigator of the Holocaust Gideon Greif, which denied the genocide in a 2021 report and questioned the number of victims. Ratko Mladic’s face, convicted as a war criminal, can now be seen in graffiti, murals, posters and photos in the Srpska Republic and Serbia; He is considered a hero for many Serbs.
Every year, in various festivities and days, Serbian nationalists parade in front of the monument to the victims of Srebernica in cars of cars, sounding the horn or with nationalist music at full volume.
In the first funerals after the change of millennium, the survivors who buried their relatives were spit by Serbian nationalists, without police intervention.
All Serbian mayors of Srebrenica after 1995 have denied the genocide in one way or another. The current mayor, Milos Vucic, considers his electoral victory in October 2024 “also as an answer to the UN resolution” approved a few months before.
Viktor Orbán Hungary has also joined the denialists of genocide. Together with Serbia and Russia, it was the only EU Member State that voted against the UN resolution on Srebrenica in July 2024.
In July 2021, the then high representative of the International Community for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, approved a law against the denial of the genocide of Srebernica. However, almost four years passed until the first verdict was issued against a genocide denialist, in May 2025.
Daily tensions continue to be. In fact, there are friction every year while the families of the murdered travel a three -day march with which they try to recreate what their ancestors made, before being killed. It weighs more indifference, far from solidarity or empathy with which they suffered the genocide, the one that is hidden in textbooks, denying the new generations the necessary knowledge so as not to stumble twice on the same stone.
For Bosnians, commemorating Srebrenic’s genocide is a fundamental component of their national identity and a constitutive moment for their state. However, the awareness of many Bosnian state representatives does not usually go beyond a must in the Potocari Memorial on July 11.
Most genocide survivors live in modest conditions, sometimes very poor and marginalized. Only surviving women who do not have male relatives receive state support. The rest lacks legal status as survivors and have never received state assistance, neither material, nor psychological.
The most distressing for survivors is that, 30 years after the genocide and despite the 2024 UN resolution, Srebrenica remains permanently without a permanent place in European memory. A clear example is the European day in memory of the victims of all the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Since 2009, it is commemorated in the EU on August 23, the day of the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. The European Commission annually publishes a statement in this regard. To date, Srebrenica has not been mentioned in it.
