Though they won’t be physically present on July 11 this year due to the pandemic, thousands of mourners will converge spiritually and virtually upon the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina to grieve for the 8,372 murdered by Bosnian Serb forces during the 1995 genocide.
They will witness the burial of newly discovered bodies; testimony to the painstaking, yet harrowing work to reunite missing persons with their loved ones twenty-five years on. There will, however, be little to provide solace to those who have suffered unimaginable losses, for with each passing year the pain and anguish born from denial and distortion of the crimes committed here grows ever more acute.
Pronouncements by leaders in Serbia and Republika Srpska (one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two entities, responsible for the war’s worst atrocities) have made a mockery of various court verdicts that the acts committed at Srebrenica constituted genocide. They reflect not only a stark refusal to accept responsibility and demonstrate remorse, but an eagerness to confine these crimes to the ash heap of history. All manner of divisive, deceptive, and disorientating tactics are employed; refutations of numbers; inversions of victimhood; conspiracies and counter-claims; plus silence about and sheer manipulation of the facts. To complicate matters further, the reign of impunity is now intermingled with the return of figures such as Momčilo Krajišnik, another Bosnian Serb political leader, sentenced for the most heinous of crimes; creating a perverse environment in which those who’ve evaded justice walk side-by-side with those deemed to have served their time for committing crimes against humanity.
