00:00There are nearly 7,000 gravestones here.
00:05This is the Srebrenica Potocari Memorial and Cemetery in eastern Bosnia.
00:1030 years ago, in July 1995, this was the site of the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
00:18More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by the army of Republika Srbska,
00:24the Bosnian Serb military force, under the command of General Ratko Mladic.
00:29To this day, many of the victims remain unidentified.
00:33As for the survivors, they are still processing the trauma.
00:37When it was only my generation, we would have been happy,
00:43but my daughters, in fact, live in the hospital.
00:48Whether they want or not, this will be part of their lives.
00:53They live with me, they talk with me.
00:57And, of course, this is something that represents their lives,
01:01which will be determined by their lives.
01:03Not only those, but also their children.
01:06But how could such a massacre have occurred?
01:10And has justice been done?
01:12The Srebrenica genocide happened during the Bosnian War,
01:16the brutal conflict that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.
01:19Between 1992 and 1995, ethnic tension in Bosnia and Herzegovina turned into violence,
01:27especially between the country's predominantly Orthodox Christian Bosnian Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks.
01:33In 1993, the United Nations declared the town of Srebrenica a safe area.
01:39It was protected by Dutch UN peacekeepers.
01:42Thousands of Bosniak civilians, already suffering from severe hunger, fled to Srebrenica,
01:49hoping they would at least be safe there.
01:52But in early July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces began attacking the town.
01:57On July 11, Srebrenica was overrun.
02:01The Bosnian Serb army demanded that the Bosniak fighters lay down their weapons in exchange for safety.
02:08But it was a deadly trap.
02:12More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were executed and buried in mass graves.
02:19The UN failed to protect the Bosniaks.
02:22The Netherlands later apologised to the relatives of victims and survivors
02:26for the Dutch peacekeepers' failure to prevent the slaughter.
02:30Years later, in 2001 and 2007 respectively,
02:34the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
02:37and the International Court of Justice ruled that what happened in Srebrenica was genocide.
02:43In other words, it was a deliberate act of killing a large number of people
02:48based on their national, ethnic or religious identity.
02:52The judges tried to return the individual crimes.
02:57In fact, the government was not a bit of a choice in the city.
02:58The country.
02:59The human rights were not a danger.
03:00The human rights were not a theft.
03:01The human rights were not a sacrifice.
03:02The human rights were not a crime.
03:03The human rights were not a crime.
03:04However, all of this in general has not affected the needs of the victims.
03:11So, restorative truth is not in a classic sense of reparation,
03:18but the recognition of what has happened
03:21and the attempt to re-construise your life as much as possible.
03:34Serhat Komladic of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
03:39He is now serving a life sentence in The Hague.
03:43But 30 years later, the pain remains.
03:46Although over 45 people were convicted of crimes relating to the massacre,
03:51several families are still searching for the remains of their loved ones.
03:56More than a thousand victims have not been identified.
04:00The emotional and political wounds caused by this tragedy run deep,
04:04and the scars are still visible.
04:07For many survivors, full justice has not been done.
04:10Serbia and Republika Srpska still deny that what happened in July 1995 was genocide.
04:30.
04:38.
04:40There's a question.
04:42.
04:43.
04:44.
04:49.
04:50.
04:51.
04:53.
04:55.
Comments