Thousands of people from Bosnia gathered in Srebrenica to mark the 30th anniversary of the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men, which has been recognised as genocide.
Some events in history cast a shadow that stretches across generations. The Srebrenica genocide is one of them. It is one of the darkest pages in Europe’s collective memory,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide.
She pointed to the obligation to “remember and preserve the truth so that future generations know exactly what happened”
The events at Srebrenica, during the war in the Balkans, in July 1995, when Bosnian Serbs killed more than eight thousand unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys, were recognised as genocide by international courts in The Hague. Top army officers and Serb political leaders were convicted on charges of massacres – some received life sentences.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is legally forbidden to deny the Srebrenica genocide. Despite this, in April 2024, the Republika Srpska parliament approved a report denying genocide, and pro-Russian local Serb leader Milorad Dodik publicly stated that the Srebrenica crime was not genocide.