The Islam Channel: Remembering Srebrenica
This year, Bosnia marks the 20th anniversary of Europe’s worst mass killing since World War Two — the slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces over five days in July 1995.
A day of guilt not just for the Serb forces but also the UN peacekeepers who failed to protect the vulnerable, and the world for watching as the atrocities took place. War crimes in Bosnia do not end or begin with Srebrenica, but it has become an open wound for the conflict which saw the genocide of the Muslim male Bosniak population trapped in the enclaves of Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb army.
A woman weeps as she visits the grave of a family member at the Potocari memorial complex near Srebrenica, 150 kilometers (94 miles) northeast of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Saturday, July 11, 2015. Twenty years ago, on July 11, 1995, Serb troops overran the eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica and executed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys, which International courts have labeled as an act of genocide, and newly identified victims of the genocide are still being re-interred at Srebrenica. (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic)
Twenty years after the killings, there are more than 1,000 men still missing with mass graves still being found. Bodies were broken up by excavators that bulldozed them into mass graves by Serb forces and then moved from the original graves to secondary locations in order to conceal the crime. Every year following excavations, the remains of those who have been identified over the past year are buried at a Memorial Centre in Potocari.
Genocide, execution, extermination, rape and murder are just some of the charges levelled against the war criminals of the Bosnian war. For the families of the lost victims, they relive the atrocities not just annually but on a day-to-day basis, as many of the culprits continue to roam free.
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