On May 23, the United Nations General Assembly will vote on a draft resolution declaring July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica.
The resolution was proposed by Germany and Rwanda and is supported by a significant number of UN Member States. In addition to designating a day of commemoration, the resolution also condemns “without reservation any denial of the Srebrenica Genocide as a historical event” and urges Member States “to preserve the facts, including through their educational systems, through the development of programs appropriate actions”, and to take action to prevent “denial and distortion, and the occurrence of genocides in the future”.
It also emphasizes the importance of “completing the process of locating and identifying the remaining victims of the Srebrenica Genocide and granting them a dignified burial” and calls for “continuing the process against the perpetrators of the Srebrenica Genocide who have not yet faced justice”. .
As a genocide survivor, I consider this resolution a much-needed acknowledgment of what happened, and the proposed day of remembrance – a crucial act to preserve the memory of the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, grandparents, and others we loved. , who were taken from us in a violent and cruel way.
Given that their existence and our suffering are constantly denied, and their torturers and killers are celebrated, this resolution gives hope that their remains will be found and that those responsible for our suffering will be brought to justice. This is crucial to the processes of reconciliation and healing, and is a necessary step towards preventing future genocides.
My family is one of thousands still searching for the remains of our loved ones killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the genocide.
In the summer of 1992, when mass murders and disappearances of Bosnian Muslims intensified in my hometown of Višegrad, my mother and father decided to separate the family. Bosnian Serb forces first targeted and killed Bosnian men and boys and abducted women and girls who were raped and murdered.
So my father took my 17-year-old brother and they fled Višegrad. My 13-year-old sister joined my aunt’s family, who also left. They all temporarily settled in Crni Vrh – a village between Višegrad and Goražde, which has not yet been captured by Serbian forces.
My mother and I – then just six years old – went to her parents’ village. As we rushed to escape, we had to leave behind my paternal grandmother, who was unable to walk due to her severe asthma. Her remains were discovered 18 years later in the mass grave at Lake Perućac.
In my mother’s village we were still not safe. As we prepared to run away again, my mother tried to convince me to leave my doll behind. Realizing how difficult it was for me to give up the doll, my grandfather hid it along with other family valuables so “I can find it when we get back”. We never went back and I never saw my grandfather again.
He and the other men from the village fled to Srebrenica. A few weeks later, my mother, grandmother and I managed to escape to Crni Vrh.
We reunited with my brother, father and sister for a short time in Crni Vrh. A few days later, my father was ambushed while scouting with some other men and disappeared. We never found out what had happened to him. Shortly afterwards we had to flee again and managed to reach Goražde, a city in the southeast of Bosnia and Herzegovina, declared one of the safe areas by the United Nations in 1993.
We spent the next three and a half years, marked by death, fear and uncertainty, in the refugee center there. We communicated with my grandfather in Srebrenica through letters delivered by the Red Cross. In one of his last letters to us, dated April 24, 1995, he assured us that he had enough food and encouraged us not to worry about him. He told us that he loved us and that he cared about us, as he had heard that the situation in Goražde was not good.
In July 1995, he and many other men and boys from his village were killed in the genocide. His partial remains were recovered from a mass grave near Zvornik in 2009. Then, in 2020, one of the missing arm bones was exhumed from another mass grave.
The reason only partial remains of victims are so often discovered is because Bosnian Serb forces attempted to hide evidence of their crimes by digging up mass graves and transferring bodies several times. In many cases, ravines, rivers and lakes were used as mass graves.
I will never forget the day we learned about the “fall of Srebrenica” and witnessed my mother’s pain upon hearing about the mass murders. As I grew older, I became aware of how she bore unbearable losses – our father, our home, our city and everything we had – with dignity and grace. However, it will forever be etched in my memory how devastated she was when she found out about her father’s death. “He was afraid? How did they kill him? Was he tortured or humiliated? What was he thinking about in the last few minutes? she wondered.
Remembering their pain, I spent my childhood and most of my adult life wishing I would never find the remains of my missing father, grandfather, paternal grandmother, and other family members, fearing what we might learn about their final days. and hours. As a child, I didn’t understand survivors’ need to find the bodies of loved ones.
My father’s aunt, whose three children were killed trying to flee Zepa in 1995, dedicated her life to finding his remains, to “burying them properly”, so that she and their souls could finally find peace . She died without finding the remains of two of them.
Her story is similar to that of hundreds of mothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hajra Ćatić, head of the Women of Srebrenica association, spent her life searching for the remains of her only son, journalist Nihad Ćatić, who reported in his last dispatch to Radio Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 10, 1995: “Srebrenica is becoming transforming it into the biggest slaughterhouse.”
“Finding even one bone would bring me back to life,” Hajra said in 2020, before passing away the following year without ever finding even that single bone from her son’s remains.
While many survivors, including my family, continue to search for the remains of more than 7,500 victims, of which 1,200 were killed in Srebrenica alone, senior state officials in Serbia and Republika Srpska, politicians, journalists and citizens, continue to deny that the genocide occurred. They called it a “fabricated myth”, questioned the reported number of victims and accused survivors of making “tombstones in Potočari for living people”, referring to the location of the Srebrenica genocide memorial cemetery.
In 2018, Republika Srpska’s parliament rejected a 2004 report, issued by a special investigative commission created by a previous Republika Srpska government, which acknowledged that Bosnian Serb forces had committed the crime of genocide in 1995.
Then, in 2019, the entity Republika Srpska created a supposedly independent commission – the Independent International Commission for the Investigation of the Sufferings of All Peoples in the Srebrenica Region in the Period from 1992 to 1995 – to “determine the truth”.
In July 2021, it published its “final report”, which stated that the majority of those killed in Srebrenica were Bosnian soldiers and not civilians and that what happened was a “horrible consequence” of their refusal to surrender to Serb forces. The document also accused the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICYT) of organizing politically biased trials of Bosnian Serb political and military leaders and of wrongly classifying the Srebrenica massacres as genocide. The report was heavily criticized and rejected by lawyers, genocide scholars and transitional justice experts.
This institutionalized denial and distortion of the truth has led to the continued dehumanization of victims and survivors. A moving recent example is the case of orthopedic doctor Nebojša Mraović.
On 21 September, the incomplete remains of two victims of the Srebrenica genocide were exhumed from the backyard of their home in the Brčko district. According to a witness, they were taken there in 1997 and later buried under a fountain.
When asked about them, Mraović, who has a private orthopedic clinic in the town of Brčko, said he saw nothing wrong with possessing the remains and that he used the bones for “planning operations”. He explained that he found them in the forest while hunting.
The remains found in his backyard belonged to Mensur Nukić and Salko Hadžić, victims of the Srebrenica genocide; their other body parts were found in mass graves in Vlasenica in 2000.
Mraović continued to practice and his license was not revoked. His lack of remorse is a reminder of the dehumanization of Bosnian Muslims that led to genocide in the 1990s and represents an increasingly apparent threat of a repeat of these atrocities.
Amid ongoing historical revisionism by the authorities and society of Republika Srpska, it is more urgent than ever to combat genocide denial.
The UN Resolution designating 11 July as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica” is a good step in the right direction.
The adoption of the resolution, which recognizes and recognizes genocide and condemns its denial and glorification of war criminals, is the least the world can do to defend the dignity of victims and survivors and commit to preventing future genocides.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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