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LeMonde
15-07-2025
- Politics
- LeMonde
In Srebrenica, 30 years after the genocide, the 'vicious circle' of denial continues
"Welcome to the Las Vegas of Bosnia, we attract at least as much attention [as the American city]." On Wednesday, July 9, the mayor of Srebrenica, Milos Vucic, displayed this peculiar sense of humor, two days before the July 11 commemorations marking the 30 th anniversary of the 1995 genocide in his city. This Bosnian Serb, who is also a cousin of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, said he would not participate in the ceremonies meant to honor the more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks killed in a matter of days by the forces of Serb General Ratko Mladic, in what is considered the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since the end of World War II. "I was not invited, and I do not see why I should go when my deputy [a Bosniak] isn't coming here," said the 37-year-old official during a small counter-ceremony he organized in a predominantly Serb neighborhood of his municipality. Decorated with Serbian flags and set to the Serbian national anthem, the event was dedicated solely to Serb victims of the war, which claimed around 100,000 lives overall between 1992 and 1995. "Serbs were killed in much more horrific ways than the Bosniaks, for example by decapitation, as seen in certain Muslim countries, but have you ever read anything about them in the international press?" Vucic exclaimed, criticizing what he described as a "double standard" from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which convicted Mladic of genocide in 2021. It mattered little that the Serb victims commemorated on Wednesday by a few dozen Serbs gathered around the mayor of Srebrenica did not die on that precise date, or that the local commander of the Bosniak forces, whom they accuse of being responsible for their deaths, has been systematically acquitted by international and Bosnian courts. The main objective was to stage a counter-event ahead of July 11, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of people this year. Several senior European officials, such as European Council President Antonio Costa and French Minister for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad, are expected to attend in this eastern Balkan town.
LeMonde
11-07-2025
- Politics
- LeMonde
International justice confronts the genocide of Srebrenica
One year after the war began in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in April 1993, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Yugoslavia – then composed of Serbia and Montenegro – to "prevent the commission of the crime of genocide." However, it would take 14 years before the ICJ ruled on Bosnia and Herzegovina's complaint, with a mixed outcome for Sarajevo. "The acts (...) were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina" in Srebrenica, the judges stated in early 2007. Therefore, these acts constituted genocide. In July 1995, nearly 8,000 men of fighting age were executed one by one. Women and children, forcibly displaced far from the enclave, were spared. However, the judges attributed responsibility for the acts to individual officers, not to Serbia itself. Belgrade was nonetheless found guilty of failing to prevent the genocide and punish its perpetrators. At the time, General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb military and political leaders, were still on the run, evading arrest warrants from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The Herald Scotland
11-07-2025
- General
- The Herald Scotland
Remember Srebrenica. Why genocide is being marked at a tree
Ðuherić was born in Scotland to a Muslim Bosniak father who had fled ethnic cleansing in his hometown of Doboj, one of the sites of Serb atrocities during the war in Bosnia, narrowly escaping being shot along with a busload of companions, by soldiers who stopped them at the side of a road. The white ribbon is symbolic, a chilling reminder of the white armbands that from 31 May 1992, any non-Serbs, chiefly Muslims and Croats, in the Prijedor municipality were ordered to wear, one of the early acts that set up for the horror that was to come. But the conifer, in a corner of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, also has a new and potent symbolism, for this is the Picea Omorika, once common in Bosnia, endemic in the Drina valley, an area targeted by Serbs for ethnic cleansing. According to documents of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, some 3,000 Bosniaks were killed during at Višegrad. Across wider Bosnia, tens of thousands were murdered. This Friday, to commemorate the atrocities at Srebrenica, where thirty years ago over 8,000 Muslims, mostly men and boys, were shot, a small group of people will gather at this small stand of conifers, to remember. The charity Beyond Srebrenica came up with the idea because, says chief executive Barry Fisher, 'there isn't a place for the Bosnian community in Scotland to commemorate, on a national level, and the idea of a tree seemed an excellent parallel of renewal and telling a new story.' Initially Beyond Srebrenica had thought of planting a new sapling but, when the charity contacted the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, they found its International Conifer Conservation Programme had already been growing the key, threatened Bosnian spruce for many years. Threatened with extinction and listed as endangered on the IECN red list, the conical and graceful picea omorika was once a widespread species, but is now restricted to a small and contracting area within Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. The current limited distribution of this species, says Dr Hannah Wilson, head of the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh International Conifer Conservation Programme, reflects a 'post-glacial contraction' in a 'cold-adapted species' that thrives in areas that are still cold. But in addition to have a limited range, the species is in decline and there are other distinct reasons for that decline. Dr Wilson says: 'There are have been lot of wildfires and deliberate burning. This has been a major threat. The 2021 fires in the Balkans resulted in the loss of 30-80% of the trees in some different populations. There was also, she notes, 'conflict-related' destruction. 'In the 1992-1993 part of the conflict a lot of the forest was intentionally burnt and that resulted in fewer than 100 mature individuals surviving in some populations.' Partly it was burnt to use as fuel, as Ðuherić explains: 'There was no electricity. The winters in Bosnia are pretty horrific, and the winter in 1993, especially, was really, really bad, and without electricity, without heating – never mind war - people die. They were just dying from cold. So many trees were chopped up to be used.' 'Even till recently you could see lots of the cities, especially Sarajevo, which was under siege, there is a weird lack of trees or greenery. That has improved a lot in the last 10-15 years. The first time I went to Bosnia was in 2002 and when you look at photos from that time, there's hardly any trees in the cities because they've been chopped down. People needed them.' Ðuherić, a lawyer, was born after the war was over in Scotland, in 1997, to a Bosniak father and Scottish mother. While her father wants, she says, not to think about the atrocities, she believes it is important for her generation, and all of us, to remember. Her father had been finishing his studies in Sarajevo when the war started, and took part in a massive student demonstration in which Radovan Karadzic, who would later be convicted of genocide and was then president of a Serb nationalist political party, had his guards shoot into the crowd. Six people were killed. It was the catalyst that started the war. 'My dad remembers running to get away because they were shooting. And so he called his dad and was like, shall I leave? Shall I stay? And his dad said, 'Well, I can't tell you. You need to make that decision.' Her father returned to Doboj, his home town, while her uncle continued to travel back and forth to Sarajevo until the city was shut off. 'In Doboj, the Serb army basically walked in unimpeded. There was no real resistance, and there was a curfew, so all non-Serbs were only allowed out between seven o'clock and 11 o'clock in the morning. People were being taken off the streets and beaten up and thrown in prison. Serbs were taking people's cars. They were coming into people's houses and saying, basically, 'What have you got, and when are you going to leave?'' The Serbs, who had military positions in the mountains around the town, bombed its mosque. Duheric says, 'When they started bombing the mosque my grandfather said, 'Now I see what this is about. Now I understand.'' It was then that her father got a seat on a convoy of buses. But the bus, she explains, which was heading to Novi Sad, was stopped en route. Soldiers got on and ordered all the Muslims to get off and to line up to shoot them. 'Luckily," she says, "there was this guy who was a Serb, and he started shouting at these, these soldiers, 'Don't you dare do that. I'm a proper Chetnik [Serbian nationalist], your family aren't proper Chetniks. I was tasked to take these children.' He was taking the children of some Muslim neighbors out to safety. He made a massive scene and they eventually let everyone back.' Ðuherić's grandparents were then still in Doboj, and during this period her grandmother found a lump in her breast. Treatment was impossible as she wasn't allowed, as a Muslim, to travel, or even permitted out of the house after 11 O'clock each day, anyway.' Though her grandparents did eventually escape to Croatia and then Slovenia, and ultimately, on a bus to the United Kingdom, arriving in February 1993, her grandmother was dead, of cancer, by October. A Bosnian woman mourns the victims of the Srebrenica genocide (Image: PA) Throughout Ðuherić's childhood, Bosnia was where they went for holidays. 'For me, it was magical. If someone said holiday, that's the same as saying Bosnia and this was the first time most of my dad's aunts and uncles and cousins had ever met us because they couldn't travel to the UK.' But, she remembers too, seeing the scars everywhere. 'There were bullet holes in every building. Some of my dad's aunts and uncles houses were half destroyed, and they were being they were in the process of being rebuilt.' It was only later she had the 'weird realisation' of quite awful it was. 'I mean, obviously war is awful, but as a child, you have no sense of what really that means.' 'When people left, many Serbs went in and lived in their houses. The first couple of years that we went back to Bosnia, there were people living in my family's houses. There was my dad's oldest uncle, his wife and adult daughter and her son all living on the top floor, and there was a Serbian family living on the bottom. People were obviously supposed to leave, but they didn't, and then to go to the courts takes a very long time.' READ MORE Beyond Srebrenica takes delegations and even school groups out to Bosnia. 'When we do,' says Fisher 'one of the first things we do is go for a walking tour around Sarajevo. And without exception everyone says, 'This is an incredible place. What an amazing European capital'. And that's the point, yeah, because it was an incredibly successful, even during the Tito years. 'On one street, in Sarajevo,' he observes, 'there is a synagogue, a mosque, a catholic church. So you can just see, yeah, without having to explain it, that, you know, the community was so mixed.' Ðuherić notes, 'There hasn't been much healing in Bosnia, I think it's fair to say, and a lot of that is politics and the country the people haven't sort of been allowed to move on because of the way the political system is structured, and that has meant that so many people are are living with their trauma every day.' 'At this point in time, lots of people who were convicted of war crimes have now served their sentence and they're back out there living in their own houses down the road from people that they were murdering and raping 30 years ago. There are also still separate school systems in Bosnia with Serb children learning one history and Muslim children learning another. Barry Fisher (left) and Hana Duheric (right) from Beyond Srebrenica (Image: GordonTerris/Herald&Times) 'How can there ever be any kind of reconciliation? How can the country ever come back together unless people are able to come together and talk to each other? Because there's very little that is actually different about these three groups of people. It's the same culture, it's the same language, it's the same history.' 'In many ways,' she says, 'the Serbs did win. The country is split into two entities. Many of these towns that were more mixed before the war are now 90-95% Serb. Srebrenica is like that. The town my dad is from is like that.' Even now, it's still believed that not all the bodies have been found. 'Every year they have a funeral for the bodies that have been found in the last year. They buried them then the Serbs unburied them. There are secondary grave sites, tertiary grave site, most of the tombs, it's not the whole person. It's a leg bone. It's bits.' But also, as Barry Fisher points out, denial is still rife in spite of the recognition of the genocide at Srebrenica by both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Even in Srebrenica, where the Memorial Center tells the story of the genocide, and where each year newly found remains are buried, there are those who still deny what happened. 'People will say there's nothing in the graves,' he observes. 'The last mayor of Srebrenica denied it had happened. Even though international delegations come and visit and get the story told to them by survivors, and the incredible mothers of Srebrenica, we've done so much to keep the story in people's consciousness. Graves at Srebrenica (Image: James McEnaney) It is therefore important, says Ðuherić, for the rest of the world to act as witness in the face of denial, to show that what happened in Bosnia has been seen. 'The world is very connected and there is so much untruth, so many stories out there that are untrue. If people are taught this is what happened and what the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia found, these are the facts, when people go online and there are lots of really right wing nationalists denying, they can challenge that.' 'This is about solidarity with ordinary people in Bosnia. They're not alone in this. There are other people who know what happened and they can tell people what happened and eventually there will at some point be no more of this denial of fact.' Never again, is a phrase often uttered. But what is clear is that the lessons of the Holocaust and of Srebrenica have not been learned. People are still othered. Atrocities are still committed. A conflict in Ukraine, and, attacks on Gaza, described by some, including Amnesty International, as a genocide, are reminders of the ever-present threat of that 'again'. Such conflict can also be a deeply upsetting reminder to Bosnians of what happened in their home country. 'What is happening in Ukraine and in Gaza is horrifying on any level,' says Ðuherić. 'But I remember especially when the war in Ukraine started there were lots of people, friends and family, who found what was happening very triggering. It's pretty close to home. It's in Europe again. Are we letting people down again, are we repeating history. We say never again but it keeps happening.' Beyond Srebrenica has many forms of outreach. The tree is their latest addition. Picea omorika has been in cultivation in the UK since 1881, but RBGE collections made during recent expeditions have greatly increased the strength of our ex situ conservation collections, resulting in over 1000 trees being grown across their network of safe sites for the conservation of threatened conifers by 80 partner gardens and institutions. 'We feel,' says Fisher, 'that the trees are a lasting place where the Bosnian community can come and pay quiet respect at a time of the year that suits them, not necessarily every year, or on the 11 July.' 'The word survivor is used a lot in our conversation. These trees are survivors. They started their life in Bosnia and are now thriving in Edinburgh. So there's a really potent parallel. I think it's about promoting a sense of looking forward, renewal. Rooted in the fact that they are survivors too.'
NDTV
09-07-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Sheikh Hasina Gave "Shoot" Orders During Deadly Bangladesh Protests: Report
Dhaka: Former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ordered security forces to "shoot" at students during last year's mass protests, according to a leaked phone call authenticated by the BBC. In the recording, Hasina is heard authorising the use of lethal weapons against demonstrators, saying, "Wherever they find [them], they will shoot." The phone call, made on 18 July 2024 from her official residence in Dhaka, captures Hasina saying, "I have ordered all of them to be arrested tonight. Everyone has been informed, wherever you find them, catch them. I have issued an open order. Now, they will use lethal weapons. Wherever they find [them], they will shoot." The protests, which began over civil service job quotas, quickly escalated into a nationwide uprising that ultimately forced Hasina from power. UN investigators say as many as 1,400 people were killed during the crackdown, the deadliest wave of political violence in the country since the 1971 war. The phone call came at a moment in the unrest, when public outrage was growing over police killings of protesters, circulating on social media. Prosecutors in Bangladesh plan to use the leaked audio as key evidence in Hasina's ongoing trial in absentia for crimes against humanity. The conversation is the clearest indication yet that Hasina directly authorised lethal force against unarmed protesters, many of them students. One of the worst massacres occurred on 5 August in Dhaka's Jatrabari neighbourhood, where police opened fire indiscriminately after the army withdrew from the area. At least 52 people were killed, according to newly uncovered evidence, far higher than earlier reports suggested. Hasina is charged with crimes against humanity, including incitement, conspiracy, and issuing orders that led to mass killings. She fled to India just before her government collapsed. Despite a request from Dhaka, India has not extradited her, and legal experts say it is unlikely she will return to face trial. Alongside Hasina, 203 individuals, including former police and government officials, have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT), with 73 in custody. Since Hasina's ouster, Bangladesh has been under an interim administration led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who is now preparing the country for national elections.
Int'l Business Times
17-06-2025
- Int'l Business Times
Survivors Of Bosnia 'Rape Camps' Come Forward 30 Years On
It took years for Zehra Murguz to be able to testify about what happened to her and other Muslim women in the "rape camps" run by Serb forces during the war in Bosnia. One of the awful memories that drove her to give evidence was of seeing a girl of 12 "with a doll in her arms" dragged into one of them. Murguz felt she was also speaking "in the name of all the others, of that girl of 12 who will never talk... who was never found". The horror began for her in the summer of 1992 when Serb forces took the mountain town of Foca and Murguz was taken to the Partizan gym, one of several notorious rape camps the Serbs ran. For months dozens of Muslim women and girls were gang raped and forced into sexual slavery there. Others were sold or killed. At least 20,000 people suffered sexual violence across Bosnia as Yugoslavia collapsed into the worst war Europe had then seen since 1945. Most victims were Bosnian Muslims, but Serbs and Croat women also suffered. In 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia became the first court in Europe to recognise rape as a crime against humanity in an historic verdict against three Bosnian Serb army officers from Foca. While a handful of survivors driven by a thirst for justice continue to collect thousands of testimonies, many remain locked in silence more than three decades on. Murguz, 61, began her judicial journey when she returned to Bosnia in 2011 -- after years living in exile in Montenegro, Serbia and Croatia -- to bring her neighbour to book for raping her during the war. "If I don't speak, it will be as if the crime never happened," she told herself. He was still living in Foca and "wasn't hiding", she said. He was arrested and tried in the local court in 2012. Going there was "like going back to 1992", to the "agony" of that time, Murguz recalled. "I came face to face with him, we looked each other in the eye, and justice won out," she said. The man was jailed for 14 years, a "light sentence", said Murguz "for the murder of three people and a rape". But the conviction at last "stamped him with his true identity -- war criminal", she told AFP from a sewing workshop in Sarajevo run by the Victims of the War Foca 1992-1995 group. Around her other survivors wove fabric together, a form of collective therapy. "To this day, only 18 verdicts have been delivered for crimes of sexual violence committed in Foca," said the group's president, Midheta Kaloper, 52. "Three trials are ongoing. A lot of time has passed, and witnesses are exhausted." She herself was a victim of "an unspeakable, inexplicable crime" in Gorazde, the "worst torture a girl can endure", she said. She still hopes the suspect will be tried in Bosnia, not in Serbia where he now lives. But Kaloper warned that things have "stagnated" over the last five years, with 258 cases involving 2,046 suspects still needing to be judged, according to figures from the High Council of Magistrates. Bosnian judges had tried 773 war crime cases by the end of last year -- over a quarter involving sexual violence -- according to the OSCE monitoring mission. It said there had been "significant delays" in hundreds of others where the suspects have yet to be identified. "What kills us most is the excessive length of these proceedings," said Kaloper. "We have been fighting for 30 years, and our only real success has been obtaining the law on civilian war victims," under which survivors can be given a pension worth about $400 a month, she said. However, the law only covers the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia and those living there, and not those living in the self-governing Serb Republika Srpska (RS) and the small mixed Brcko District in the northeast, which have different judicial systems. Around 1,000 survivors have obtained war victim status in the Muslim-Croat federation and some 100 more in the RS and Brcko, said Ajna Mahmic, of the Swiss legal NGO Trial International. Rape, she said, still carries a particular stigma. "Unfortunately, as a society we still put the blame and shame on the victims rather than the perpetrators. "Many of the survivors do not feel secure," Mahmic told AFP. "Some of the perpetrators are still living freely and some are working in public institutions," some in positions of authority. Not to mention the continued glorification "of war criminals (in the Balkans) and the minimisation of the suffering we have endured", Kaloper added. Nearly half of ongoing cases are held up because the accused are abroad, an OSCE report said in January. Another "worrying trend is the widespread failure of courts to grant victims compensation" in criminal cases, the OSCE added. While witnesses could testify anonymously in The Hague, there is nothing to protect their identity in civil compensation proceedings in Bosnia. "Even today it is very difficult for victims to speak," said Bakira Hasecic, 71, head of the Women Victims of War group, and they keep the "weight of this tragedy in their hearts". Many follow what their former torturers are up to on social networks. It is an emotional "timebomb that can explode at any moment and drives some to call us", she said. Though over 30 years have passed, 15 more victims stepped forward needing to talk in the last few months alone, Hasecic said. Bakira Hasecic: 'Even today it is very difficult for victims to speak' AFP Stitching her life back together: Zehra Murguz AFP Bosnian rape survivors weave together in a therapy centre in Sarajevo AFP Glorifying guilty men: a monument to Bosnian Serb fighters in Foca AFP
