Srebrenica
Between 1992 and 1995, around 40,000 Muslim Bosniaks fled the Bosnian Serb advance and siege in Srebrenica. They chose the then “protected enclave” of Eastern Bosnia to survive, but were unknowingly heading for a hole from which they could not get out while the rest of the country bled to death from the war. Finally, on July 11 Bosnian Serb military entered Srebrenica and carried out the largest genocide in Europe since World War II.
On that fateful day, as thousands of women and children took refuge in the old battery factory that the United Nations Protection Forces (UNPROFOR) used as a base in the town of Potočari, around 15,000 men, mostly civilians, fled through the mountains in the direction of the city of Tuzla.
Today, in front of that group of factories, is the Potočari memorial, a gigantic cemetery inaugurated in 2003. Since then, on July 11th, a collective funeral has been held in memory of the bodies identified during the previous year and remembered to all the victims. Today the Potočari memorial houses the graves of the nearly 7,000 victims of the massacre already identified.
For a few days, hundreds of family members and thousands of pilgrims from all corners of Bosnia and from other countries fill the streets of this mountainous town, returning at times the Muslim majority that it had before the ethnic cleansing. However, for the rest of the year, Bosnian Serbs make up the majority and, since 2016, they also rule.
Srebrenica symbolizes the pain of the Bosnian Muslims, but also reflects the differences that remain between them and the Bosnian Serbs, whose leaders continue to refuse to acknowledge the existence of the genocide. A quarter of a century later, the wounds of the Bosnian war remain unhealed and many people neither forget nor forgive.
The funerals on July 11, 2020 were also marked by the 25th anniversary, by the Covid-19 pandemic. A situation that, however, did not stop the people who wanted to commemorate such a symbolic date.
WORK IN PROGRESS.