Sober Ceremony Marks 25th Anniversary of Srebrenica Massacre

By Stefan J. Bos, Special Correspondent Worthy News

(Worthy News) – Bosnia-Herzegovina commemorated over the weekend the 25th anniversary of Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two. Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were shot end killed by invading Serb forces in and around the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in one of the darkest episodes of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

Outgunned Dutch United Nations peacekeepers failed to protect them, an open wound that has not yet healed in the Netherlands. On July 11, 1995, Serb forces overran Srebrenica. Dutch troops watched as Serb forces took around 2,000 men and boys from the U.N. compound for execution while bussing the women and girls to Bosnian government-held territory.

In the woods around Srebrenica, Serb soldiers hunted the fleeing Bosniaks, as Bosnian Muslims are otherwise known, killing them one by one. It was the “worst atrocity on European soil since the end of the Second World War,” recalled Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

“Twenty-five years ago, yet it feels only like yesterday,” he added.

Rutte and other current and former world leaders spoke to the survivors in video messages. They stayed away amid fears of the coronavirus pandemic. Survivors wearing mouth masks, mainly women, tried to comfort each other with the words of far-away officials.

Somber music was now heard where once the cries and screams of victims echoed through the mountains.

On Saturday, nine newly identified victims were buried at a flower-shaped cemetery near Srebrenica at the sober ceremony. It is here where tall white tombstones mark the graves of 6,643 other victims who were buried here after careful DNA testing. About 1,000 victims remain to be found.

HIDING EVIDENCE

The killers sought to hide evidence of the genocide, piling most of the bodies into hastily made mass graves. They subsequently dug up these graves with bulldozers and scattered the bodies across numerous burial sites.

World leaders speaking at the ceremony called the Srebrenica Massacre a failure of the international community. During the Bosnian war, Bosnian Serb forces were able to push non-Serbs out of territories they sought for their Serb statelet. Fleeing Muslims took shelter in several eastern towns, including Srebrenica, designated as United Nations “safe zones.” But eventually, the Dutch peacekeepers abandoned them.

“It’s been profoundly moving for me… to continue to add my voice to those across the world who grieve for the families of those killed,” said former U.S. President Bill Clinton. “It’s [a] brazen reminder of the terrible cost to all of us when we turn our backs on our shared humanities,” he added.

Britain’s Prince Charles called the massacre “a dreadful stain on our collective conscience.” The international community, he stressed, “failed those who were killed, those who somehow survived and those who endured the terrible loss of their loved ones.”

But the wounds of history have not yet healed. A special U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague and courts in the Balkans have sentenced close to 50 Bosnian Serbs to more than 700 years over the Srebrenica genocide. Those convicted include commander Ratko Mladic and his political chief Radovan Karadzic. Yet even today, they remain heroes for many Serbs, who deny that the genocide happened.

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