28 years since Srebrenica genocide when 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed
Thousands of people in cities and villages across Bosnia and Herzegovina came together on Tuesday to commemorate the 28th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, a tragic event that took the lives of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in and around the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
The mass killings began on July 11, 1995, when the Bosnian Serb military, police and paramilitary formations forcefully took control of Srebrenica and the surrounding “safe area” established by the United Nations during the three-year devastating Bosnian War.
The genocidal massacre that took place in the following twenty days was the worst atrocity committed during the Yugoslav Wars, as well as the worst massacre that occurred in Europe since World War II.
Both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that these mass crimes constituted genocide, but Serbian officials have to date refused to admit that it was genocide or massacre.
Those tragic events played a significant role both in ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the further development of political events in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
What is Srebrenica?
Srebrenica is a mountain town located in the easternmost part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, very close to the border with Serbia. It is regionally known for its spa tourism and mining industry, especially silver, from which it got its name.
In 1991, a year before the outbreak of the Bosnian war, the municipality of Srebrenica had 36,666 inhabitants, three-quarters of whom were Muslim Bosniaks, and the rest were mostly Orthodox Serbs.
After the war, according to the 1995 Dayton Agreement, Srebrenica was included in the territory of Republika Srpska (RS), a Bosnian Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
As a result of genocide and war persecution, the municipality of Srebrenica today has only 13,409 inhabitants, of which slightly more than half are Bosniaks (Muslims).
What was the prelude to massacre?
In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia began to disintegrate into several states, among them Bosnia and Herzegovina, which seceded through a referendum on independence in 1992.
Bosnian Serbs, who made up about a third of the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, boycotted the referendum and launched an armed rebellion with the aim of creating an ethnically clean Serbian state.
The Bosniak municipality of Srebrenica was an obstacle to these Serbian irredentist plans since it geographically separated two areas with the Serb majority.
With larger military forces and the support of the Yugoslav army, Bosnian Serb forces soon besieged the town and left it isolated from the rest of the world.
The siege of the town lasted for more than three years and during that period local Bosniak commanders like Naser Orić successfully defended the enclave, which was often exposed to Serbian attacks and shelling.
The Srebrenica enclave, protected by the UN as a “safe area” in 1993, was overcrowded with thousands of refugees from the surrounding areas and had problems with supplies as humanitarian convoys were often robbed by Serbs.
