The world will mark 30 years since the Srebrenica genocide on Friday, but promises of “never again” from western leaders ring hollow to many survivors of the Serb massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys.
Two years before the slaughter led by Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic’s troops, Srebrenica had been declared a United Nations safe haven, where Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians would be protected by international peacekeepers.
But Mladic was right to think the promise of protection was empty. As his forces shelled and overran the enclave, lightly armed Dutch soldiers in the area pleaded for air strikes. UN, Nato and western leaders dithered, and Serb troops simply expelled the peacekeepers and took control over tens of thousands of terrified Bosniaks.
“We were left to be murdered. Nobody cared,” says Jasmin Jusufovic, who as an eight-year-old in Srebrenica saw his father taken away to be executed by Serb soldiers who also killed all his other closest adult male relatives.
“We were put in a concentration camp under an open sky and then on July 11th ... you are trusting the Serbs – who have shown you for the past four years what they are capable of – to do something humane in Srebrenica,” he says.
“So as much as the culprits and responsibility for the genocide are Serb, it is also on the international community ... Because this is a genocide that was served on a plate to the Serbs.”
The Bosnian war was in its fourth year when the Serbs seized Srebrenica. Jusufovic and his parents had been driven from their home in the village of Drinjaca, 55km northwest of the town, when Serbs attacked the area in May 1992.
“We were having lunch for Eid. Everything my mother had prepared for the festival was left on the table. We just had to go.”
With his parents and members of his extended family, Jusufovic watched from the surrounding hills as Serb armour destroyed their house and the village mosque.
They joined waves of Bosniaks who were being put to flight by a Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia. The desperate situation was compounded by a western arms embargo on Bosnia that put its military at a huge disadvantage to Serb forces that had access to large stockpiles of ex-Yugoslav army weapons.
In January 1994, the family had to flee again as Serb units bore down on the town of Konjevic Polje. They trekked through deep snow to reach Potocari – a village outside Srebrenica that is now the site of a burial ground for more than 6,700 victims of the genocide – and Jusufovic remembers being chilled to the bone when they arrived.
Srebrenica genocide: Why Bosnia is still divided 30 years on
“A family friend in Srebrenica gave us a house to live in, because it was empty after his mother had been killed by the Serbs. Ten of us lived in two rooms. And I started to go to school in Srebrenica,’ Jusufovic recalls.
“I always remember my family trying to live as normally as they could, no matter what the circumstances. Spring came and I remember everyone going out of the house and finding a bit of land to plant and grow something,” he says.
“I was getting this feeling of life functioning. My parents and other relatives were there, I was going to school, making friends. I could forget about the siege happening around us. As a kid you don’t have big territory – just your house and your school.
Sporadic gunfire and shelling intensified as Serb advances in 1995 made a mockery of western declarations that Srebrenica should be a demilitarised zone.
“On July 8th, I was woken up early by a rumbling noise that I could feel in my bones, as if it was coming through the ground. The attack on Srebrenica had started,” says Jusufovic. “We were so heavily bombarded that it felt like we were boiling in a pot. There would be a few minutes of respite, maybe when they were reloading, when we could run to check on my grandmother or uncles or cousins. It was all frantic running.”
By the morning of July 11th it was too dangerous to stay in Srebrenica. Jusufovic’s parents again gathered up a few essentials and he wondered which books to stuff into his rucksack. He chose The Little Prince, a children’s encyclopedia and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: “I remember looking out from our house, which overlooked the road, and seeing a sea of heads running,” he says.
Thousands of people sought protection at the Dutch peacekeepers’ base at a former battery factory in Potocari, as Mladic’s triumphant men roamed the area.
“Don’t be afraid, no one will harm you,” Mladic told terrified Bosniaks, as he and his men threw chocolates and cigarettes to their new prisoners.
To his own people Mladic gave a different message, peppered with slurs that Serbs have used against Muslims since the days of Ottoman rule in the Balkans.
“Here we are, on July 11th, 1995, in Serb Srebrenica. We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,” Mladic said in an address filmed by a Serb cameraman. “Finally ... the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region.”
First, the Serb troops took away Bosniak men trapped outside the locked gates of the packed battery factory. Two days later, the Serbs ordered people inside the UN base to come out, and the peacekeepers just looked on.
Jusufovic and his mother climbed into a waiting truck with other women and children, as the Serbs separated out the men and some of the boys.
“I saw the Serbs pushing my father away. He was holding my red jacket. I remember watching him, voiceless but everything inside me was screaming. And he just put his finger to his lips to tell me to stay silent and keep going.”
He was shot dead in the village of Pilica, where Serb soldiers executed hundreds of prisoners in a cultural centre.
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“Three of my mother’s brothers were also murdered in Srebrenica, and a fourth in Drinjaca,” Jusufovic says. “My father’s brother was murdered in Srebrenica. The husbands of my father’s sisters, four of them, were also murdered. The husband of my mother’s sister was also murdered in Srebrenica, as was his father. The father of my aunt was also murdered, as were more distant relatives.”
Jusufovic’s father was buried in the memorial cemetery at Potocari only in 2012. Like many victims of Serb killings, his remains were found in multiple graves after Serbs moved bodies using mechanical diggers and dump trucks to try to hide war crimes. Seven victims recently identified through DNA analysis will be buried there on Friday.
International courts ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide and, after 14 years on the run, Mladic was found guilty of genocide along with Radovan Karadzic, wartime political leader of the Bosnian Serbs.
Serbia and Republika Srpska – an autonomous Serb entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina – acknowledge that grave crimes were committed at Srebrenica but deny it was genocide, and glorification of war criminals is not uncommon in Serb society, making reconciliation with Bosniaks a remote prospect.
“The facts of this case have been established so many times over and are readily available,” says Emir Suljagic, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre that is housed in the former battery factory that became the doomed base for UN peacekeepers.
“We’re not going to debate facts. When facts are not debated, then we can sit down and have any kind of conversation. This is the most researched and investigated mass atrocity in the 20th century. DNA techniques, satellite technology and all other types of electronic technology were used. So join reality, then we can talk.”
In advance of Friday’s commemoration events, UN secretary general António Guterres acknowledged that “the United Nations and the world failed the people of Srebrenica. This collective failure was not an accident of history. It was the result of policies, propaganda and international indifference.”
Yet such statements sound false to many Bosniaks when the West cannot find the conviction to stop current conflicts, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Israel’s onslaught against Gaza.
“Today what hurts me, and I’m having serious trouble grasping, is that I’m remembering Srebrenica while Srebrenica is happening in Gaza,” Jusufovic says.
“What have we learned from Srebrenica if we are allowing all of this to happen again now? Every kid I see ... their soul being ripped from their body with shock and tragedy, shaking with starvation – was me 30 years ago,” he adds.
“Whenever I see international officials empathising about Srebrenica while staying silent on Palestine – excuse me, I don’t believe a word of what you are saying. If you really mean it, then do something. The whole point of Srebrenica is never again – anywhere.”
