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Thousands of people are expected to attend commemorative ceremonies today marking the 27th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.
The remains of the 50 victims found will be buried in the Potoçari Memorial Center – where the graves of over 6,670 other victims are located.
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces entered Srebrenica – the area declared safe by the United Nations.
In the days that followed, they killed over 8,000 Muslim men and boys and dumped their bodies in pits in the surrounding forests.
The murders happened in a matter of days, but the process of finding the bodies has taken years and the identification and burial of the remains is still ongoing.
The massacre of Srebrenica, which happened five months before the end of the war in Bosnia, has been described as the worst in Europe since the end of the Second World War, while the International Court of The Hague has recognized it as genocide.
So far, 47 people have been sentenced to more than 700 years in prison for their roles in the massacre.
The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, has been sentenced to life in prison, as has the former military leader in Bosnia, Ratko Mladic.
The political leaders of the Serbs who live today in Bosnia and in neighboring Serbia refuse to admit that genocide took place in Srebenica and call the massacre a “great crime”.
Last July, the former high international representative for Bosnia, Valentin Inzko, outlawed denial of genocide and war crimes, making such an act punishable by prison terms.
The law has caused anger among the Bosnian Serbs, who are led by Milorad Dodik, at the same time a member of the tripartite Presidency of this country.
Dodik has begun the process of withdrawing Serbs from the military, judiciary and tax system, prompting fears of Bosnia’s disintegration or the start of a new conflict.
On the eve of marking the 27th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and EU Enlargement Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi have issued a joint statement, saying that in Srebrenica, “Europe has failed”.
“It is more than ever our duty to remember the genocide of Srebrenica… to stand up to defend peace, human dignity and universal values,” they said.
“Still today, we cannot take peace for granted,” Borrell and Varhelyi said, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The mass killings and war crimes we see in Ukraine bring vivid memories of what happened in the Western Balkan wars in the 1990s,” said the two senior European diplomats.
According to the Institute of Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina, over 1,200 victims of the Srebrenica massacre are still missing./ Radio Free Europe
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