The opening photo of this dossier is not the terrible, overused image of the white body bags lined up at the Potočari Memorial. Nor the endless rows of white tombstones arranged like flower petals in the cemetery.
We chose a statue. It depicts a man, Ramo Osmanović, with his arms outstretched. He is calling his son, Nermin.
In July 1995, the two were forced by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries to enact a macabre scene. Ramo was filmed (you can watch the video here) shouting for Nermin to come to him, pretending everything was safe. Father and son were killed shortly after. Nermin’s body was found in a mass grave in Snagovo, near Zvornik; his father’s, in Zeleni Jadar, near Srebrenica.
At the Genocide Memorial Museum, that video plays on a loop. And today, in front of the school he attended, Nermin has become carved memory. A boy who represents the 8,372 Bosniak men and boys murdered in Srebrenica. Victims of a crime that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice have both recognized as genocide.
That genocide was the culmination of a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Ratko Mladić’s troops against the Bosnian Muslim population. In a matter of days, men and women were separated, children were torn from their mothers, women were raped, families were destroyed. And yet, while history has recorded those days among the darkest in contemporary Europe, politics and revisionism are still working today to erase them once again.
This was powerfully recalled by Emir Suljagić, director of the Srebrenica Memorial, in a speech we feature in this dossier:
"When we emerged alive from the forests of eastern Bosnia, in July 1995, no one believed us. Our stories were too horrific to be accepted. For years we had to prove every single detail, inch by inch, bone by bone. But we did it. Not only to establish the facts, but to defend our humanity."
July 11, 1995, was not a bolt from the blue. It was the tragic outcome of a path carefully constructed. That’s why we’ve included in this work an excerpt from the Gariwo dossier “The Stages of Hatred,” written by Tatjana Đorđević based on Gregory Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide. Eight stages – from classification to persecution – that, when combined, lead to genocide. In Srebrenica, these stages unfolded with alarming precision: religious identity became stigma, propaganda became flesh, dehumanization became extermination.
And throughout all of this, the United Nations were present — but did not act. Srebrenica had been declared a UN safe area in 1993. It was guarded by a Dutch contingent of UNPROFOR, poorly armed, with no offensive mandate, and abandoned by the international community. When Mladić’s troops broke through in July 1995 and began systematically separating men from women, the blue helmets did not fire a single shot. They stood by, powerless. There was no evacuation, no air strike, no resistance. It was a total failure of diplomacy and multilateralism, one that left a deep stain on the moral authority of the United Nations — a stain that still awaits full accountability.
But it was not only a failure of the United Nations. It was also a defeat for Europe and the West. Requests for air support were ignored. Western governments — French, British, American — had decided that neutrality was preferable to truth, that balancing the sides mattered more than protecting human lives. And so, the genocide unfolded before the eyes of the world. And the world looked away.
And today? It is not enough that the truth be carved into a verdict. Thirty years on, in much of Serbia and in Republika Srpska — where Srebrenica is located — denial is routine. Mladić and Karadžić, convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide, are still seen by many as “heroes of the people.” School textbooks deliberately omit the word genocide. An entire generation has grown up not knowing — or worse: learning that nothing ever happened.
This is why, now more than ever, remembering Srebrenica must not be only about commemorating the horror of July 1995. It is about bearing witness that justice, if not living memory, risks becoming filing cabinet history.
In the darkness of that story, there were also lights. People who swam against the tide — saving lives, documenting crimes, resisting the spiral of hatred. The Righteous of Srebrenica: Nedret Mujkanović, a Bosniak officer who saved over 100 Serb prisoners. Natasa Kandić, a Serbian jurist who was the first to publicly denounce the atrocities. Hasan Nuhanović, a UN interpreter and survivor, who turned his loss into a fight for truth. Latinka Perović, a Serbian intellectual ostracized for rejecting ethnic nationalism. Svetlana Broz, cardiologist and granddaughter of Tito, who gathered and told stories of moral resistance and worked for years with Gariwo to build a Garden of the Righteous. Thanks to people like them, we can still believe there is room for dignity, even in catastrophe.
There are also builders of the future. In Srebrenica, a football club, FK Guber, has chosen coexistence as the only viable path. And a music school, the House of Good Tones, welcomes both Bosniak Muslim and Serb youth. When Tatjana Đorđević and I visited them, the school’s director, Ismar Porić, told us:
“Traveling, seeing the world, opens minds and makes kids less vulnerable to manipulation. Every one of our concerts is a small victory over everything Srebrenica has been through.”
In a country where ethnic divisions still cut across schools, hospitals, even ambulances, these are seeds of peace planted against the wind.
This dossier is an act of responsibility. It tells the story of genocide, but also of those who resisted it, those who bore witness, those who healed, those who still educate in the name of truth and reconciliation. It is our way — as Gariwo — of resisting oblivion, revisionism, and indifference.
Remembering Srebrenica means fighting denial, but also telling stories of bridges, as Alex Langer — who tirelessly worked for peace in the former Yugoslavia and died just days before the genocide — would have said.
Today, as Suljagić put it,
“Many survivors did not live long enough to see the recognition we are receiving today. But we are here also for them. To give those who come after us shoulders to stand on.”
Srebrenica is not just a place. It is a moral test for Europe, for law, for human conscience.
It is not enough to remember Srebrenica. One must choose a side — every day.
Every genocide begins with words no one dared to contradict.
