Srebrenica genocide remembered 30 years on: ‘Fear kept me moving’

The United Nations paused Thursday to mark one of Europe’s darkest chapters — the Srebrenica genocide — as survivors and world leaders gathered to remember the more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys systematically killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995. Decades later, the wounds haven’t closed.

A massacre the world watched unfold

Srebrenica was supposed to be safe. The UN had declared it a protected enclave, yet Dutch peacekeepers on the ground were powerless to stop Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić from rounding up and executing Muslim men and boys over a period of roughly ten days. Bodies were buried in mass graves, then dug up and reburied in secondary graves to conceal the evidence. To date, forensic teams have identified over 6,600 victims. Hundreds remain unaccounted for.

The scale of the slaughter — carried out in broad daylight, with the international community watching — still defies easy comprehension.

‘Fear is all that kept me moving’

Fatima Osmanović was 14 when her father and two brothers were taken. She walked for three days through the forest toward government-held territory with a group of women and children, barefoot and starving. “Fear is all that kept me moving,” she said, recalling how the sound of gunfire never seemed far away. “You didn’t stop. You couldn’t.”

She is now 44 and lives in Tuzla. She still attends the annual burial ceremony at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery, where victims are interred as they are identified. This year, an additional 17 newly identified victims were laid to rest, bringing the total buried at the site to 8,102.

The UN’s moment of reflection

At UN headquarters in New York, Secretary-General António Guterres led a solemn ceremony. A senior UN official addressing the gathering was blunt: “The failures of 1995 must never become a blueprint for inaction elsewhere. We owe survivors not just remembrance, but accountability.”

The General Assembly formally recognized July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica in a resolution passed last year, though the vote was contested, with Serbia and Russia among those opposing it.

Justice incomplete, memory fragile

Mladić was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2017 and sentenced to life in prison. But survivors and advocacy groups argue that justice remains unfinished. Bosnia’s political landscape is still fractured along ethnic lines, and denial of the genocide — particularly within Republika Srpska — is widespread and, critics say, state-sanctioned.

So the fight isn’t only about memory. It’s about facts being protected in a political environment where they’re still under attack.

As the ceremony in New York closed Thursday, survivors were already looking ahead to next year — the 30th anniversary — hoping that by then, a few more names will have been matched to the bones still waiting in a lab somewhere in Bosnia.