Latest news with #NeverAgain
Hans India
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Hans India
Vivek Agnihotri credits yoga and satvik food for reversing chronic illness
Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri, known for his bold and thought-provoking cinema, recently took to social media to highlight the transformative impact of Yoga, pranayam, and satvik food on his health. Sharing a personal revelation on his official X (formerly Twitter) account, Agnihotri stated that adopting a holistic lifestyle helped him overcome chronic medical conditions he had battled for decades. 'Yoga, pranayam and satvik food changed my life. I had some chronic medical conditions for decades which got reversed completely. No science is complete. It's the synergy which works,' Agnihotri wrote, emphasizing the power of natural wellness practices over conventional medicine. He further pointed out how the Western world is increasingly embracing what India has known for centuries—lifestyle medicine based on yoga, meditation, and plant-based nutrition. 'Now in the West they are practicing lifestyle medicine based on Yoga, pranayam, meditation and plant-based food. But as I learnt in marketing that you can't convince salesmen,' he added, taking a subtle dig at the skepticism surrounding traditional wellness systems. On the professional front, Agnihotri is preparing for the release of his upcoming socio-political drama The Bengal Files, slated to hit Indian theatres on September 5, 2025. But before its domestic release, the film will have an exclusive premiere across 10 major U.S. cities as part of the 'Never Again' tour. The cities included in the tour are New Jersey, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Raleigh, Tampa, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The U.S. premieres will run from July 19 to August 10, and Agnihotri is inviting fans to book their seats in advance. He recently dropped a high-impact promotional video for the 'Never Again' tour, which featured glimpses from his previous works The Tashkent Files and The Kashmir Files, along with a sneak peek into The Bengal Files. 'USA, are you ready for The Bengal Files? Grand Premieres across the USA...10 Cities. 1 Truth. If The Kashmir Files hurt you… The Bengal Files will haunt you,' Agnihotri captioned the post, building anticipation for his latest film.
Atlantic
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
How to Recover From State Terror
In March 1985, I was likely one of the first American tourists to visit Argentina after a military junta relinquished power. Raúl Alfonsín, a human-rights lawyer, was leading the country's first democratically elected government since the early 1970s. And Nunca Más ('Never Again'), a government commission's report on its surprisingly rapid investigation into the fate of the desaparecidos, the people 'disappeared' by the previous regime, was so popular that it was being hawked at Buenos Aires newsstands. For the junta's opponents, it was a buoyant time, but the euphoria didn't last. The so-called Dirty War, a campaign of kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder that resulted in as many as 30,000 extrajudicial deaths, left lasting scars. Alfonsín was obliged to pursue a delicate political balancing act: He had commissioned the investigation and backed trials of the junta's leaders. But then, fearing another coup, he reversed course, supporting legislation that impeded further prosecutions. That pattern of advance and retreat continued under successor regimes. Like Germany after the defeat of Hitler, Argentina lurched back and forth between judging its past crimes and trying to move beyond them. The ensuing decades saw amnesties, trials, protests, severe economic and political turmoil, and the conversion of former detention facilities and other sites into a memorial landscape. An Argentinian alliance of human-rights organizations dedicated to remembrance and justice calls itself Memoria Abierta ('Open Memory'), suggesting a task that remains perpetually unfinished. In her deeply reported new book, A Flower Traveled in My Blood, Haley Cohen Gilliland both encapsulates that complicated dynamic and explains its broader relevance. 'Around the world,' she writes, 'in countries attempting to wrestle with histories of violence and trauma, the same questions tend to recur. How should peace be balanced with justice? Is it better, for the health of a society, to pardon or punish the perpetrators?' Caught 'between the drive to forget and the obligation to remember,' Argentina is 'a case study in the classic frictions that afflict such processes of reckoning.' In Argentina, this reckoning means more than insisting on justice and commemorating (and identifying) the dead. It involves the persistent challenge of recovering and reuniting the living. Since 1977, near the brutal peak of the junta's 1976–83 rule, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have marched on Thursday afternoons in front of the Casa Rosada, Argentina's seat of government, to demand an accounting for their disappeared children. Despite the danger—some of these mothers, too, were murdered by the junta—they were soon joined by another group: Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, intent on the return of grandchildren, including those born to mothers in detention and illegally adopted. With persistence, investigative ingenuity, and cutting-edge genetic tools, the grandmothers have so far tracked down 140 of those missing children. Read: My sister was disappeared 43 years ago Gilliland focuses on the ordeal of a single shattered family, widens her lens to include other cases, and embeds her tale in a crisp account of recent Argentinian history. Formerly the Argentina and Uruguay correspondent for The Economist and now the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative, Gilliland has long harbored an interest in the grandmothers' quest. Preoccupied with other work, she waited, she concedes, until almost the last possible moment to tackle the subject. Many potential sources are now dead, and one of Gilliland's key informants, Rosa Roisinblit, was 102 when Gilliland finally managed to interview her. Fortunately, the author also benefited from the cooperation of Roisinblit's grandson, Guillermo, who had been illegally adopted, and the University of Washington geneticist Mary-Claire King, whose research helped reunite Guillermo, however uneasily, with his biological family. Gilliland borrows her title from a line in a poem, 'Epitaph,' by Juan Gelman, a celebrated Argentine writer whose personal history makes her use of it particularly apropos. The poem was written before Gelman's own son and pregnant daughter-in-law were kidnapped in the Dirty War. They were killed, and his newborn granddaughter was stolen and later found with an adoptive family in Uruguay. The titular flower does metaphorical double duty in Gilliland's story. It represents both the grandmothers' yearning for their kin and the genetic markers that proved consanguinity. A Flower Traveled in My Blood begins in 1978 with an account of the kidnappings of José Manuel Pérez Rojo and his pregnant partner, Patricia, who was Rosa Roisinblit's daughter. The federal police also took the couple's 15-month-old daughter, Mariana, but left her with relatives. Both José and Patricia had been Montoneros, left-wing guerrillas, but had largely retreated from activism. It didn't matter. The junta swooped down on militants, dissidents, and innocents alike, conveying them in green Ford Falcons to secret sites without formal charges. Some detainees were eventually released; some were murdered in prison; still others were drugged and flung from planes into the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic Ocean. Apart from those directly affected, civil society was slow to mobilize. Rosa, desperate to locate both her missing daughter and the grandson (Guillermo) who she knew had been born in captivity, appealed, with little success, to the federal justice system and Jewish organizations. She finally found solidarity with her fellow grandmothers. They met surreptitiously, but also marched, petitioned, and eventually attracted international attention. Science proved to be an indispensable ally. King, the geneticist, experimented with different methods of establishing grandpaternity before settling on mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down almost intact through the maternal line. A genetic match can be made with a single maternal relative, and the forensic technique has since been adopted in missing-persons and human-rights cases worldwide. In Argentina, the process of reconnecting families could be both emotionally and legally fraught. Not every lost child was happy to be found; custody battles could be wrenching. And the same evidence that linked children to biological relatives could spur a criminal case against their adoptive parents, some of whom had ties to the military and its illicit actions. Gilliland uses Guillermo's case to illustrate these complications. Guillermo's adoptive father, Francisco Gómez, was an employee of the air force. He knew details of José's torture and Patricia's detention, but claimed that the baby boy he adopted had been abandoned. He was also violently abusive toward his wife, according to Guillermo. 'His beatings were so savage they sometimes sent Jofré to the hospital,' Gilliland writes. After they divorced, he mostly neglected his son. As often happened, Guillermo's whereabouts were revealed to the grandmothers' organization by an anonymous tipster. When Guillermo's sister, Mariana, tracked him down, Guillermo was skeptical but agreed to a DNA test, which confirmed their connection. His initial contacts with Mariana and his two grandmothers, Rosa and Argentina, were warm. But when his adoptive father was arrested and charged with kidnapping and falsification of official documents, Guillermo was furious. (Gómez was convicted and served more than six years on those charges. He was later sentenced to another 12 years for his role in the disappearance of Guillermo's parents.) Guillermo worried, justifiably, that the next step was the prosecution of his adoptive mother, 'the one person by whom he felt unconditionally loved.' He felt betrayed by Mariana and his grandmothers. 'His past life might have been one giant, festering lie,' Gilliland writes. 'But his new reality was worse.' Guillermo's relationship with Mariana grew particularly strained. They fought over the division of government reparations for their slain parents, their grandmother Argentina's medical treatment, and the disposition of her ashes after her death. But over time, Guillermo embraced both Rosa and her larger cause. (Mariana declined to speak with Gilliland.) The author clearly admires the grandmothers' tenacity, but she raises questions about the costs of their mission and the methods involved—in particular, the practice of aggressive, sometimes nonconsensual collection of DNA evidence. 'To whom does identity belong?' Gilliland asks. 'Is it the sole property of an individual—or does their family and their society also have a right to truth?' Germany took decades to come to terms with its responsibility for the Holocaust. Since the 1980s, I have reported on those efforts: the competing narratives at concentration-camp memorials, the tangled history of the Jewish Museum Berlin, the development of a complex landscape of memory. And in 2019, I finally returned to Buenos Aires to assess Argentina's reckoning, which had begun with so much promise. The work of memorialization seemed vibrant, but still incomplete. No single museum offered a definitive narrative of the junta, the desaparecidos, and the quest for justice. Memory remained fractured, the history unsettled. Even the number of desaparecidos was still vigorously contested. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and their supporters continued to march weekly. In 1986, the organization had splintered into two factions. The 'founding line' wanted exhumations, reparations, prosecutions—closure for past injustices. The other faction was more focused on radical social change. What struck me most during my visit was a difference in affect. The founding line walked somberly, holding photographs and drawings of missing relatives, while the more radical marchers sang and clapped boisterously. Tourists crowded in with cameras, and the mothers sold handcrafted souvenirs. At La Recoleta, the elegant cemetery whose 'rhetoric of shade and marble' Jorge Luis Borges had famously elegized, I stopped to grieve at Alfonsín's tomb. The Parque de la Memoria ('Remembrance Park') was similarly poignant: a large, silent space with a zigzagging granite memorial to the desaparecidos and other murder victims, and an array of sculptures on the banks of the Río de La Plata. Claudia Fontes's stainless-steel Reconstruction of the Portrait of Pablo Míguez, representing a kidnapped child, seemed to rise from the river itself and stare across its expansive waters, as though searching for the corpses below. Former black sites had become memorials as well. The most notorious, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, had been converted into the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory. I took a guided tour, saw the basement where detainees had been tortured, watched the video testimony of survivors, and learned, at the House for Identity, of the grandmothers' genetic-matching project. Here in the U.S., some commentators have compared the current Trump administration's expansion of executive authority to the early days of the Third Reich, with its blitzkrieg consolidation of power over the German political system, economy, and culture. But the federal government's turn to sudden, legally questionable seizures of the undocumented, visa and green-card holders, and even some American citizens, often by unidentified masked men, more closely evokes the abuses of South American military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. Whatever the specific parallels, the problem of how to recover from such assaults on the law and the polity remains vexing. The trauma always outlasts the injury. Gilliland points to Argentina as a pioneering model for its quick initial response and groundbreaking forensics. But it is also a cautionary tale about the slippery route to healing. She notes that the country's current right-wing populist leader, Javier Milei, is something of an apologist for the junta's bloody rule. The seesawing continues. Argentina's lessons for the current moment are multiple: When tyrants threaten, more people and institutions may cower than resist; the loss of checks on state violence can be catastrophic; and no one knows who the next victim will be. This much is clear: Recovering from the damage will be even messier and more difficult than preventing it in the first place.
Irish Times
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
‘I'm remembering Srebrenica while Srebrenica is happening in Gaza'
The world will mark 30 years since the Srebrenica genocide on Friday, but promises of 'never again' from western leaders ring hollow to many survivors of the Serb massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. Two years before the slaughter led by Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic's troops, Srebrenica had been declared a United Nations safe haven, where Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians would be protected by international peacekeepers. But Mladic was right to think the promise of protection was empty. As his forces shelled and overran the enclave, lightly armed Dutch soldiers in the area pleaded for air strikes. UN, Nato and western leaders dithered, and Serb troops simply expelled the peacekeepers and took control over tens of thousands of terrified Bosniaks. 'We were left to be murdered. Nobody cared,' says Jasmin Jusufovic, who as an eight-year-old in Srebrenica saw his father taken away to be executed by Serb soldiers who also killed all his other closest adult male relatives. 'We were put in a concentration camp under an open sky and then on July 11th ... you are trusting the Serbs – who have shown you for the past four years what they are capable of – to do something humane in Srebrenica,' he says. 'So as much as the culprits and responsibility for the genocide are Serb, it is also on the international community ... Because this is a genocide that was served on a plate to the Serbs.' Jasmin Jusufovic, a Bosniak who was eight years old when he survived the Srebrenica genocide, in which Bosnian Serb troops killed his father and all his other closest adult male relatives. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin The Bosnian war was in its fourth year when the Serbs seized Srebrenica. Jusufovic and his parents had been driven from their home in the village of Drinjaca, 55km northwest of the town, when Serbs attacked the area in May 1992. 'We were having lunch for Eid. Everything my mother had prepared for the festival was left on the table. We just had to go.' With his parents and members of his extended family, Jusufovic watched from the surrounding hills as Serb armour destroyed their house and the village mosque. They joined waves of Bosniaks who were being put to flight by a Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia. The desperate situation was compounded by a western arms embargo on Bosnia that put its military at a huge disadvantage to Serb forces that had access to large stockpiles of ex-Yugoslav army weapons. In January 1994, the family had to flee again as Serb units bore down on the town of Konjevic Polje. They trekked through deep snow to reach Potocari – a village outside Srebrenica that is now the site of a burial ground for more than 6,700 victims of the genocide – and Jusufovic remembers being chilled to the bone when they arrived. Srebrenica genocide: Why Bosnia is still divided 30 years on Listen | 39:42 'A family friend in Srebrenica gave us a house to live in, because it was empty after his mother had been killed by the Serbs. Ten of us lived in two rooms. And I started to go to school in Srebrenica,' Jusufovic recalls. 'I always remember my family trying to live as normally as they could, no matter what the circumstances. Spring came and I remember everyone going out of the house and finding a bit of land to plant and grow something,' he says. 'I was getting this feeling of life functioning. My parents and other relatives were there, I was going to school, making friends. I could forget about the siege happening around us. As a kid you don't have big territory – just your house and your school. Sporadic gunfire and shelling intensified as Serb advances in 1995 made a mockery of western declarations that Srebrenica should be a demilitarised zone. 'On July 8th, I was woken up early by a rumbling noise that I could feel in my bones, as if it was coming through the ground. The attack on Srebrenica had started,' says Jusufovic. 'We were so heavily bombarded that it felt like we were boiling in a pot. There would be a few minutes of respite, maybe when they were reloading, when we could run to check on my grandmother or uncles or cousins. It was all frantic running.' By the morning of July 11th it was too dangerous to stay in Srebrenica. Jusufovic's parents again gathered up a few essentials and he wondered which books to stuff into his rucksack. He chose The Little Prince, a children's encyclopedia and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: 'I remember looking out from our house, which overlooked the road, and seeing a sea of heads running,' he says. Thousands of people sought protection at the Dutch peacekeepers' base at a former battery factory in Potocari, as Mladic's triumphant men roamed the area. 'Don't be afraid, no one will harm you,' Mladic told terrified Bosniaks, as he and his men threw chocolates and cigarettes to their new prisoners. To his own people Mladic gave a different message, peppered with slurs that Serbs have used against Muslims since the days of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. 'Here we are, on July 11th, 1995, in Serb Srebrenica. We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,' Mladic said in an address filmed by a Serb cameraman. 'Finally ... the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region.' First, the Serb troops took away Bosniak men trapped outside the locked gates of the packed battery factory. Two days later, the Serbs ordered people inside the UN base to come out, and the peacekeepers just looked on. Jusufovic and his mother climbed into a waiting truck with other women and children, as the Serbs separated out the men and some of the boys. 'I saw the Serbs pushing my father away. He was holding my red jacket. I remember watching him, voiceless but everything inside me was screaming. And he just put his finger to his lips to tell me to stay silent and keep going.' He was shot dead in the village of Pilica, where Serb soldiers executed hundreds of prisoners in a cultural centre. [ Srebrenica genocide: Why Bosnia is still divided 30 years on Opens in new window ] 'Three of my mother's brothers were also murdered in Srebrenica, and a fourth in Drinjaca,' Jusufovic says. 'My father's brother was murdered in Srebrenica. The husbands of my father's sisters, four of them, were also murdered. The husband of my mother's sister was also murdered in Srebrenica, as was his father. The father of my aunt was also murdered, as were more distant relatives.' A Bosnian Muslim woman visits gravestones during a funeral ceremony for 50 newly-identified Bosnian Muslim victims, at the Potocari Memorial Centre and Cemetery in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in July 2022. Photograph: Jasmin Brutus/EPA Jusufovic's father was buried in the memorial cemetery at Potocari only in 2012. Like many victims of Serb killings, his remains were found in multiple graves after Serbs moved bodies using mechanical diggers and dump trucks to try to hide war crimes. Seven victims recently identified through DNA analysis will be buried there on Friday. International courts ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide and, after 14 years on the run, Mladic was found guilty of genocide along with Radovan Karadzic, wartime political leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Serbia and Republika Srpska – an autonomous Serb entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina – acknowledge that grave crimes were committed at Srebrenica but deny it was genocide, and glorification of war criminals is not uncommon in Serb society, making reconciliation with Bosniaks a remote prospect. Emir Suljagic, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin 'The facts of this case have been established so many times over and are readily available,' says Emir Suljagic, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre that is housed in the former battery factory that became the doomed base for UN peacekeepers. 'We're not going to debate facts. When facts are not debated, then we can sit down and have any kind of conversation. This is the most researched and investigated mass atrocity in the 20th century. DNA techniques, satellite technology and all other types of electronic technology were used. So join reality, then we can talk.' [ 'It's an honour to be able to send a warning': Defiant Sarajevo a scarred survivor of Bosnia's war Opens in new window ] In advance of Friday's commemoration events, UN secretary general António Guterres acknowledged that 'the United Nations and the world failed the people of Srebrenica. This collective failure was not an accident of history. It was the result of policies, propaganda and international indifference.' Yet such statements sound false to many Bosniaks when the West cannot find the conviction to stop current conflicts, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Israel's onslaught against Gaza . 'Today what hurts me, and I'm having serious trouble grasping, is that I'm remembering Srebrenica while Srebrenica is happening in Gaza,' Jusufovic says. 'What have we learned from Srebrenica if we are allowing all of this to happen again now? Every kid I see ... their soul being ripped from their body with shock and tragedy, shaking with starvation – was me 30 years ago,' he adds. 'Whenever I see international officials empathising about Srebrenica while staying silent on Palestine – excuse me, I don't believe a word of what you are saying. If you really mean it, then do something. The whole point of Srebrenica is never again – anywhere.'
Irish Times
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
‘The whole point of Srebrenica is never again – anywhere': West's sympathy rings hollow to many survivors of genocide
The world will mark 30 years since the Srebrenica genocide on Friday, but promises of 'never again' from western leaders ring hollow to many survivors of the Serb massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. Two years before the slaughter led by Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic's troops, Srebrenica had been declared a United Nations safe haven, where Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians would be protected by international peacekeepers. But Mladic was right to think the promise of protection was empty. As his forces shelled and overran the enclave, lightly armed Dutch soldiers in the area pleaded for air strikes. UN, Nato and western leaders dithered, and Serb troops simply expelled the peacekeepers and took control over tens of thousands of terrified Bosniaks. 'We were left to be murdered. Nobody cared,' says Jasmin Jusufovic, who as an eight-year-old in Srebrenica saw his father taken away to be executed by Serb soldiers who also killed all his other closest adult male relatives. 'We were put in a concentration camp under an open sky and then on July 11th ... you are trusting the Serbs – who have shown you for the past four years what they are capable of – to do something humane in Srebrenica,' he says. 'So as much as the culprits and responsibility for the genocide are Serb, it is also on the international community ... Because this is a genocide that was served on a plate to the Serbs.' Jasmin Jusufovic, a Bosniak who was eight years old when he survived the Srebrenica genocide, in which Bosnian Serb troops killed his father and all his other closest adult male relatives. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin The Bosnian war was in its fourth year when the Serbs seized Srebrenica. Jusufovic and his parents had been driven from their home in the village of Drinjaca, 55km northwest of the town, when Serbs attacked the area in May 1992. 'We were having lunch for Eid. Everything my mother had prepared for the festival was left on the table. We just had to go.' With his parents and members of his extended family, Jusufovic watched from the surrounding hills as Serb armour destroyed their house and the village mosque. They joined waves of Bosniaks who were being put to flight by a Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia. The desperate situation was compounded by a western arms embargo on Bosnia that put its military at a huge disadvantage to Serb forces that had access to large stockpiles of ex-Yugoslav army weapons. In January 1994, the family had to flee again as Serb units bore down on the town of Konjevic Polje. They trekked through deep snow to reach Potocari – a village outside Srebrenica that is now the site of a burial ground for more than 6,700 victims of the genocide – and Jusufovic remembers being chilled to the bone when they arrived. 'A family friend in Srebrenica gave us a house to live in, because it was empty after his mother had been killed by the Serbs. Ten of us lived in two rooms. And I started to go to school in Srebrenica,' Jusufovic recalls. 'I always remember my family trying to live as normally as they could, no matter what the circumstances. Spring came and I remember everyone going out of the house and finding a bit of land to plant and grow something,' he says. 'I was getting this feeling of life functioning. My parents and other relatives were there, I was going to school, making friends. I could forget about the siege happening around us. As a kid you don't have big territory – just your house and your school. Sporadic gunfire and shelling intensified as Serb advances in 1995 made a mockery of western declarations that Srebrenica should be a demilitarised zone. 'On July 8th, I was woken up early by a rumbling noise that I could feel in my bones, as if it was coming through the ground. The attack on Srebrenica had started,' says Jusufovic. 'We were so heavily bombarded that it felt like we were boiling in a pot. There would be a few minutes of respite, maybe when they were reloading, when we could run to check on my grandmother or uncles or cousins. It was all frantic running.' By the morning of July 11th it was too dangerous to stay in Srebrenica. Jusufovic's parents again gathered up a few essentials and he wondered which books to stuff into his rucksack. He chose The Little Prince, a children's encyclopedia and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: 'I remember looking out from our house, which overlooked the road, and seeing a sea of heads running,' he says. Thousands of people sought protection at the Dutch peacekeepers' base at a former battery factory in Potocari, as Mladic's triumphant men roamed the area. 'Don't be afraid, no one will harm you,' Mladic told terrified Bosniaks, as he and his men threw chocolates and cigarettes to their new prisoners. To his own people Mladic gave a different message, peppered with slurs that Serbs have used against Muslims since the days of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. 'Here we are, on July 11th, 1995, in Serb Srebrenica. We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,' Mladic said in an address filmed by a Serb cameraman. 'Finally ... the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region.' First, the Serb troops took away Bosniak men trapped outside the locked gates of the packed battery factory. Two days later, the Serbs ordered people inside the UN base to come out, and the peacekeepers just looked on. Jusufovic and his mother climbed into a waiting truck with other women and children, as the Serbs separated out the men and some of the boys. 'I saw the Serbs pushing my father away. He was holding my red jacket. I remember watching him, voiceless but everything inside me was screaming. And he just put his finger to his lips to tell me to stay silent and keep going.' He was shot dead in the village of Pilica, where Serb soldiers executed hundreds of prisoners in a cultural centre. [ Srebrenica genocide: Why Bosnia is still divided 30 years on Opens in new window ] 'Three of my mother's brothers were also murdered in Srebrenica, and a fourth in Drinjaca,' Jusufovic says. 'My father's brother was murdered in Srebrenica. The husbands of my father's sisters, four of them, were also murdered. The husband of my mother's sister was also murdered in Srebrenica, as was his father. The father of my aunt was also murdered, as were more distant relatives.' A Bosnian Muslim woman visits gravestones during a funeral ceremony for 50 newly-identified Bosnian Muslim victims, at the Potocari Memorial Centre and Cemetery in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in July 2022. Photograph: Jasmin Brutus/EPA Jusufovic's father was buried in the memorial cemetery at Potocari only in 2012. Like many victims of Serb killings, his remains were found in multiple graves after Serbs moved bodies using mechanical diggers and dump trucks to try to hide war crimes. Seven victims recently identified through DNA analysis will be buried there on Friday. International courts ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide and, after 14 years on the run, Mladic was found guilty of genocide along with Radovan Karadzic, wartime political leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Serbia and Republika Srpska – an autonomous Serb entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina – acknowledge that grave crimes were committed at Srebrenica but deny it was genocide, and glorification of war criminals is not uncommon in Serb society, making reconciliation with Bosniaks a remote prospect. Emir Suljagic, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre. Photograph: Daniel McLaughlin 'The facts of this case have been established so many times over and are readily available,' says Emir Suljagic, head of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre that is housed in the former battery factory that became the doomed base for UN peacekeepers. 'We're not going to debate facts. When facts are not debated, then we can sit down and have any kind of conversation. This is the most researched and investigated mass atrocity in the 20th century. DNA techniques, satellite technology and all other types of electronic technology were used. So join reality, then we can talk.' [ 'It's an honour to be able to send a warning': Defiant Sarajevo a scarred survivor of Bosnia's war Opens in new window ] In advance of Friday's commemoration events, UN secretary general António Guterres acknowledged that 'the United Nations and the world failed the people of Srebrenica. This collective failure was not an accident of history. It was the result of policies, propaganda and international indifference.' Yet such statements sound false to many Bosniaks when the West cannot find the conviction to stop current conflicts, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Israel's onslaught against Gaza . 'Today what hurts me, and I'm having serious trouble grasping, is that I'm remembering Srebrenica while Srebrenica is happening in Gaza,' Jusufovic says. 'What have we learned from Srebrenica if we are allowing all of this to happen again now? Every kid I see ... their soul being ripped from their body with shock and tragedy, shaking with starvation – was me 30 years ago,' he adds. 'Whenever I see international officials empathising about Srebrenica while staying silent on Palestine – excuse me, I don't believe a word of what you are saying. If you really mean it, then do something. The whole point of Srebrenica is never again – anywhere.'
India.com
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- India.com
How Vivek Agnihotri Reversed His Medical Conditions: Says, 'With the Help of…'
Celebrated filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri used social media to shed light on the importance of Yoga, pranayam, and satvik food in leading a healthy life. The 'Buddha in a Traffic Jam' maker revealed that he was able to reverse some of his prolonged medical conditions by including Yoga and satvik food in his lifestyle. Taking to his X (formerly known as Twitter) timeline, Agnihotri wrote, 'Yoga, pranayam and satvik food changed my life. I had some chronic medical conditions for decades which got reversed completely. No science is complete. It's the synergy which works.' Stressing how now the Western countries are also following lifestyle medicine in the form of yoga and plant-based food, the director added, 'Now in the west they are practicing lifestyle medicine based on Yoga, pranayam, meditation and plant based food. But as I learnt in marketing that you can't convince salesmen.' On the professional front, Agnihotri is waiting for the release of his highly-awaited drama, 'The Bengal Files', which is expected to be out on September 5 this year. Before the release, 'The Bengal Files' will be premiered in the USA in July. The 'Never Again' tour of the drama will include ten U.S cities. — New Jersey, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, DC, Raleigh, Tampa, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. On Friday, Agnihotri dropped a promotional video for the 'Never Again' tour on social media. The clip included glimpses from 'The Tashkent Files', 'The Kashmir Files', and 'The Bengal Files' trailer, along with information regarding the premiere dates and cities of the tour. 'USA, are you ready for The Bengal Files? Grand Premieres across the USA…10 Cities. 1 Truth. If The Kashmir Files hurt you… The Bengal Files will haunt you. 🇺🇸 NEVER AGAIN TOUR | Premieres from July 19 – August 10, 2025…Be the first in the world to watch. BOOK YOUR SEATS NOW: the director wrote in the caption.
