International officials joined thousands of mourners in eastern Bosnia on Friday to mark 30 years since Serb forces massacred 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. They also attended the burial of victims whose remains are still being pieced together from mass graves.
Leaders of western states and most neighbouring countries called for a renewed commitment to prevent genocide anywhere in the world, while Serbia and Bosnian Serb officials continue to reject international court rulings that the massacre was genocide.
“In this moment of remembrance, we reaffirm our unwavering commitment to accountability and truth,” European Council president Antonio Costa said. He was speaking at a commemoration ceremony at the vast cemetery at Potocari, just outside Srebrenica, where 6,772 Srebrenica victims are buried after seven were laid to rest on Friday.
Srebrenica genocide: Why Bosnia is still divided 30 years on
“There is no room in Europe - or anywhere else - for genocide denial, revisionism, or the glorification of those responsible. Denying such horrors only poisons our future. It is our duty to confront and acknowledge the full truth. This is the first step in ensuring that such atrocities never happen again,” Mr Costa said.
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“Even as we are all together to mourn and remember, we also carry the promise of renewal ... A journey from war and genocide to peace and prosperity. The European Union is a project of peace, born from the ashes of a tragic war and driven by a vision of reconciliation. This is the same vision that inspires us on the enlargement to the western Balkan countries. We believe the place of Bosnia ... is in the European Union.”
Bosnia’s progress towards the EU is stymied by a dysfunctional political system imposed by the Dayton Accords - which ended a 1992-1995 war that killed 100,000 people – and by Serb rejection of deeper integration in the Muslim-majority country and their refusal to accept genocide was committed at Srebrenica.
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Serbian and Bosnian Serb leaders acknowledge that grave crimes took place, but deny that it was genocide against Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims).
“Today marks 30 years since the terrible crime in Srebrenica was committed,” Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic said on social media. “We cannot change the past, but we must change the future. Once again, on behalf of the citizens of Serbia, I express my condolences to the families of the Bosniak victims, confident that a similar crime will never happen again.”
The wartime Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were convicted of committing genocide at Srebrenica by a United Nations tribunal at The Hague, and two international courts ruled that genocide took place.
Srebrenica had been declared as a UN “safe haven” for Bosniaks from a Serb campaign of so-called ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia. However, the UN, Nato and western governments stood idle as Mladic’s forces overran the area on July 11th, 1995, expelled Dutch peacekeepers and seized thousands of Bosniak civilians.
The men and boys were separated from the women and executed over the following days in fields, forests, warehouses, farm buildings, cultural centres and other locations.
Later, Serbs excavated mass graves with bulldozers, moved bodies across the country in dump trucks and reburied them to hide war crimes. As a result, the remains of many victims were dispersed between multiple graves, and only pieced together over time using advanced DNA identification techniques.
“The mass identification of victims in Bosnia…has demonstrated that the fog of war cannot completely obscure the truth – and when the truth is recovered, justice becomes possible,” said Munira Subasic, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica movement and Kathryne Bomberger, director-general of the International Commission on Missing Persons, in a joint statement.
