• World
  • Jul 11

30th anniversary of Srebrenica genocide

• The United Nations observes July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.

• Srebrenica is a town located in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina.

• This year marks the 30-year anniversary of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, in which more than 8,000 lives were lost, thousands were displaced and families and communities were devastated.

• This was the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.

The genocide in Srebrenica

• The war that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia claimed more than 100,000 lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, mostly of Bosnian Muslims, and displaced more than two million others.

• The massacre in Srebrenica marked one of the darkest chapters of that war.

• In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army overran Srebrenica, which was previously declared a safe area by the Security Council, and brutally murdered thousands of men and teenagers there.

• A small and lightly armed unit of Dutch peacekeepers under the UN flag were unable to resist the Bosnian Serb force.

• Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladic separated men and boys from women and executed them. Their remains were found years later in mass graves in eastern Bosnia, though some still do not know where their relatives died.

• The genocide claimed the lives of at least 8,372 people, mostly Muslim men and boys, and led to the displacement of over 20,000 women and children who were forcibly expelled from their homes.

• The Srebrenica killings were a bloody climax of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

• Both Serbia and Bosnian Serbs have denied that genocide happened in Srebrenica.

• Mladic and his political chief Radovan Karadzic were jailed for life for war crimes, including genocide, while nearly 50 Bosnian Serbs were also convicted.

• The brutal killings of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by the army of Republika Srpska was recognised as an act of genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as well as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

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