Thirty years have passed since the Srebrenica genocide

Eduardo González On July 10, 1995, exactly thirty years ago, the assault on the Bosnian city of Srebrenica began, leading to a massacre that was not only the most serious recorded on European soil since World War II, but also epitomized the tragedies and miseries of both the century that was about to end and the one to come. The murder of approximately 8,000 men from the Bosniak Muslim community at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces was compounded by the international community's eternal inability to prevent the avoidable, the sacrifice of human rights in favor of political calculations, and, of course, the denialism common in cases of genocide. Srebrenica, the "Silver City," is a small mountain town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1992, the year the country was hit by the metastasis of Yugoslavia's wartime collapse, the population was 73 percent Bosniak Muslims and 25 percent Bosnian Serbs. Due to its ethnic composition and strategic position, the city was a symbol for all parties involved in the conflict. For radical Bosnian Serb nationalism, a Muslim Srebrenica posed a physical obstacle to their attempt to create an ethnically pure and interconnected state within the Republika Srpska (RS, the Serb entity of Bosnia). Consequently, control of the city had become a key objective for RS political and military leaders, who considered not only the capture but also the ethnic purification of Srebrenica essential to weakening the military resistance of the flailing Bosnian Muslim state. For the Bosnian Muslim community, by clear contrast, the city represented a hope for their survival as a people and for the viability of their own state, all the more so since, beginning in 1995, it began to become a place of refuge for the vast majority of the surrounding region's Muslim inhabitants fleeing the armed conflict. Likewise, for the international community, Srebrenica had become the most prominent of the six security areas established by the United Nations Security Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with Sarajevo, Zepa, Gorazde, Tuzla, and Bihac. This resulted in the deployment of a military contingent from the UN Protection Force in Bosnia (UNPROFOR), initially Canadian and later Dutch. The siege The months leading up to the tragedy already foreshadowed the imminent Serbian offensive. Between February and March 1995, Bosnian Serb forces blocked access to UN convoys, and in May, as a result, UNPROFOR warned that serious malnutrition problems had begun to appear among the enclave's civilians, resulting in the deaths of at least seven people. In early July, in an obvious strategic maneuver, Bosnian Serb forces managed to confiscate vital components of TOW anti-tank missiles from the Dutch forces assigned to the UNPROFOR mission in Srebrenica, and even managed to prevent the entry of new Dutch troops, whose meager contingent was thus reduced from 400 to 300. Around the same time, the commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Serb Army, the infamous General Ratko Mladic, announced his intention to attack Srebrenica to "neutralize the terrorists" of the Bosniak-Muslim Army who were using the enclave for their operations against Serb civilians. On July 6, Mladic's forces, positioned less than two kilometers from the city, began shelling civilian targets in Srebrenica. The city had little fuel, fresh food was running out, and the enclave was home to nearly 40,000 people, including residents and refugees. The Bosnian Serb forces found the siege particularly easy. To make matters worse, the few and poorly armed Dutch UNPROFOR soldiers were only authorized to use force in self-defense. When the Serb bombings began, Bosnian Muslims asked the Dutch military to hand over the weapons confiscated by the peacekeepers, but their request was denied. Amid the tension, a Dutch soldier was shot dead by a desperate Bosnian fighter. From that moment on, the situation spiraled out of the UN's control. On July 8 (although some sources postpone this to July 10, a significant difference), the Dutch commander of the Dutchbat, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Karremans, requested air support from the UN command in Sarajevo. However, the request was rejected by the UN commander in Bosnia, British Lieutenant General Rupert Smith, who, according to Western military sources, wanted to prevent an escalation of Bosnian-Serb hostility toward the UN forces. On July 9, nearly 26,000 civilians were crammed into the outskirts of the city, which normally housed 4,000 inhabitants. In the midst of the offensive, the UN opted to withdraw its troops, leaving a contingent of only 70 troops. That same day, a desperate Karremans demanded that General Bernard Janvier, the UN commander-in-chief and military commander in Sarajevo for UNPROFOR forces, send air support. Around that time, EU mediator Karl Bildt was in Belgrade to negotiate with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic over the recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state. General Janvier felt that an air offensive against the Bosnian Serbs could ruin the talks and decided to reject the Dutch military's request. "If Karremans can manage without air support, let him try," was his response. Mladic: “The time has come for revenge on the Turks” Under these circumstances, Karremans’ ultimatum to the Bosnian Serb forces to withdraw by 6:00 a.m. must have sounded like a joke. On July 10, the assault began. The Security Council condemned it and ordered the Bosnian Serbs to surrender. The Pentagon downplayed the attack, claiming it was mere “revenge” for the Sarajevo offensive and a simple attempt to “intimidate the UN and discredit the Bosnian government.” In the early afternoon, General Ratko Mladic, accompanied by Serbian television cameras, strolled through the streets of Srebrenica. “The time has come for revenge on the Turks,” he declared. On July 11, General Janvier (belatedly) surrendered to the evidence and finally agreed to authorize the deployment of air support. Four American NATO F16s managed to destroy a Bosnian Serb tank, but little else. The planes arrived late and, to top it all off, were almost out of fuel, forcing them to divert to Italy to refuel. Once the capture of Srebrenica was confirmed, between 20,000 and 25,000 Bosnian Muslim refugees (mostly women, children, and the sick) fled to the Dutch base at Potocari, six kilometers to the northeast (in Republika Srpska territory), where they eked out a living with little food or water in the July heat typical of the Balkans. Meanwhile, around 15,000 men, both civilians and militiamen, attempted to escape through the mountains, while Bosnian Serb forces kidnapped 50 Dutch soldiers and threatened to bomb Potocari. In response to these threats, NATO simply chose to suspend armed actions against the Bosnian Serbs. Inside Srebrenica, Mladic offered Karremans alcohol and cigarettes, before whom he strutted and displayed a slaughtered pig as an example of what would happen to him if he did not submit to his will. In a display of "humanitarian heroism," international peacekeepers handed over to the Serbs no fewer than 5,000 Bosnian Muslims who had taken refuge in Potocari in exchange for the release of 14 Dutch soldiers who had been taken hostage. On July 12, then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Gali was asked during a press conference whether Srebrenica represented the United Nations' greatest failure in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The response was, to say the least, interesting: "No, I don't think it represents a failure. We can see the glass as half full or half empty. We continue to help refugees and have managed to keep the conflict within the borders of the former Yugoslavia." Of course, he made no mention of the UN's obligation to protect the "safe zone" of Srebrenica, including its inhabitants. The massacre Once Mladic's forces captured Potocari, they proceeded to separate the men between the ages of 12 and 77, taking them to the towns of Bratunac, Petkovci, Kozluk, Kravica, and Orohovac for "interrogation" about alleged war crimes. On July 13, two days after the occupation, the killings began in Kravica, and on July 16, the figures for the massacre began to emerge. As it became clear over time, many prisoners chose to commit suicide, and others died crowded into a hangar while being shot at. A witness saw three trucks full of Muslims and a bulldozer drive into the forest; the trucks returned empty. It is estimated that after the enclave was captured, more than 8,000 Muslim men, including boys as young as twelve, were summarily executed. On July 11, 1996, exactly one year after the massacre, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued a public indictment against the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, respectively, for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed in Srebrenica. It was the beginning of a long adventure of complicity, secret protections (some in the context of the Dayton Peace Accords, with the direct involvement of the United States), cover-ups, extravagant disguises, and even ridiculous identity swaps that culminated in the capture of Radovan Karadzic in July 2008 in Belgrade and of Ratko Mladic on May 26, 2011, in the Serbian region of Vojvodina (northern Serbia). Mladic (currently 83) and Karadzic (80) were sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes and genocide during the conflict, which left nearly 100,000 dead. Both remain in prison today. The other major defendants in the massacre are former Bosnian Serb commander Radislav Krstic, sentenced to 46 years in prison for genocide in 2001, and former Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in March 2006 in the ICTY prisons in The Hague. The Netherlands' responsibility and denialism As expected, the Srebrenica case became, almost from the beginning, a particularly sensitive issue in the Netherlands. In 2002, Wim Kok's government resigned en masse due to its "shared responsibility for the massacre" following the publication of a report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD). This report downplayed the responsibility of the Dutch peacekeepers charged with protecting the enclave, but accused politicians of sending the soldiers on an "impossible mission." However, the Dutch government has tried for years to evade ultimate responsibility, insisting that its forces were abandoned by the UN mission, which provided no air support. On July 5, 2011, an appeals court in The Hague dismissed the government's arguments by finding the Dutch state "responsible" for the deaths of Bosnian Muslims it had allowed to leave Srebrenica despite knowing their lives were in danger. Finally, in July 2022, the Dutch government apologized to all victims and survivors of the genocide for "the international community's failure to provide adequate assistance to the people of Srebrenica." As for the countries and groups most implicated in the massacre, the toll remains disappointing. In 2010, the Serbian Parliament approved a declaration of apology for the crime of Srebrenica, but without using the word "genocide." Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (a former supporter of "Greater Serbia" who served as Minister of Information under President Slobodan Milosevic) has persistently clung to the well-worn argument that "all sides suffered" in the Yugoslav wars. When he was Serbian prime minister, Vucic attended the 20th anniversary commemoration of the massacre in Potočari in 2015, attempting to highlight the need for Serbs and Bosniaks to live together and overcome the war, but was attacked by the crowd. For their part, the leaders of the Republika Srpska continue to refuse to use the term "genocide," and its president, Milorad Dodik, has become one of the leading and most vocal genocide deniers in both the RS and Serbia. Both the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that the acts committed in Srebrenica in 1995 during the wider conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), constituted genocide. In July 2024, the United Nations General Assembly established the International Day of Commemoration of the Srebrenica Genocide. The decision was rejected by Belgrade (Vucic declared, after the vote, that Serbia is "proud" because "those who wanted to stigmatize it have not succeeded") and by the Republika Srpska. Viktor Orbán's Hungary was the only EU member state to vote against the UN resolution, which received more than 100 abstentions and was also opposed by China, the United Arab Emirates, and Vladimir Putin's Russia.

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