Remember Srebrenice

Today, July 13, marks exactly one month since I cycled in Srebrenica — a small village in the southeast of Bosnia & Herzegovina, near the Drina River that forms the border with Serbia.

It’s also exactly 30 years since the Dutch UN battalion, Dutchbat, was forced by Serb forces to hand over the refugees they were sheltering. Just two days earlier, Bosnian Serb troops under the command of Ratko Mladić had overrun Srebrenica. Women and girls were put onto buses and taken away, while the men, often including boys, were separated, transported elsewhere, and brutally executed. Very few survived to later testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Only a small number of Serbs and Croats were ever convicted.

While in Sarajevo, I had visited the Memorial Gallery, a small but deeply moving museum dedicated to the Srebrenica genocide. Located near the Sacred Heart Cathedral in the city center, the gallery combines haunting photography, video testimonies from survivors, and multimedia installations. It offers a stark, human perspective on the events of July 1995.

I had cycled for two days from Sarajevo and was prepared to see the many tomb stones at Potočari, a few kilometres before Srebrenica. As with many war cemeteries, it looked beautifully maintained in rememberance of those who died. It was the abandoned battery factory across the road that hit me the most though.

I still remember watching the BBC news in 1995. I was living in India then, and the scenes from Srebrenica seemed horrific, but distant. The full scale of the killing wasn’t clear to most TV viewers. Now, decades later, I found myself standing inside that very factory where thousands of people had once taken shelter to survive the heat and misery. They were desperate, exhausted, and completely dependent on the lightly armed UN peacekeeping force to protect them.

Potočari had been declared a UN "safe area." But the world did nothing to defend it by bombing the Serb positions. Even when Dutchbat requested NATO air support, approval was delayed or even denied. Only after the deadly shelling of Sarajevo’s marketplace, which killed 43 civilians, did NATO finally launch airstrikes, starting on August 30. That campaign eventually broke the siege of Sarajevo, but came far too late for Srebrenica. It was Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

That night, I stayed in Srebrenica at a private apartment hosted by an elderly Serb woman. She was kind and welcoming, and offered me tea. She didn’t speak English - let alone share stories from her life - but her quiet presence was a poignant reminder that in this region, victims and perpetrators still live side by side.

From Srebrenica I cycled across the Drina into Serbia and Montenegro before arriving in Mostar on my way back to Split, Croatia. The historical Old Bridge (Stari Most) build in 1566 during the Ottoman era, had been destroyed Croatian Defence Forces (HVO) on November 9, 1993. It was moving to walk across that bridge, reconstructed in 2004. It was painful to also see here many buildings still riddled with bullet holes silent reminders of a war not so long past.

You can learn more at the official Srebrenica Memorial website.