I cannot say ‘I was there’, but I can set out the facts

I have no memory of Srebrenica. I cannot remember it, of course. I was not watching television in July 1995; I did not experience the shock of those who discovered that in the Europe of Schengen, NATO and the UN – fifty years after Auschwitz – it was still possible to organise the extermination of a community. I can, however, do something that is perhaps needed today: set out what we know. Because the images coming out of Belgrade reveal a shocking paradox. Ratko Mladic, who died on 27 August in The Hague whilst serving a life sentence, was accompanied to the cemetery by thousands of people, amidst Serbian flags and portraits of the general. The coffin was carried in a procession while the crowd chanted his name. President Aleksandar Vučić was not present, but his son was. The European Union protested against the glorification of a war criminal.

But a criminal of what? The question remains unanswered to this day.

We must go back to 1992. Yugoslavia was breaking up, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, and a brutal war began in the country between Bosniak Muslims, Serbs and Croats. However, this does not make all the crimes equivalent, and above all it does not alter what happened in Srebrenica. Mladic, a general in the Yugoslav Army, became commander of the army of the Republika Srpska – the Bosnian Serb republic – in May 1992. According to international court rulings, the plan pursued by the Bosnian Serb leadership was to permanently remove Muslims and Croats from the territories claimed by the Serbs. Sarajevo was then surrounded: for almost four years, its citizens lived under a barrage of shelling and sniper fire.

Srebrenica is a small town in eastern Bosnia. In 1993, the UN had declared it a ‘safe area’ and deployed a Dutch battalion there. The designation was meant to signify: you may not enter here. In July 1995, Mladic’s forces entered. On 11 July, the town fell. Between twenty and thirty thousand Bosnian Muslims fled towards Potocari, where the UN peacekeepers’ base was located, seeking international protection.

At this point, we must pause to consider one detail. What followed was neither a battle that ended badly nor a spontaneous massacre. It was a systematic operation. The men and boys were detained. Thousands more, attempting to flee through the woods towards territory controlled by the Bosnian army, were captured. The prisoners were herded into schools, sheds and warehouses; taken to execution sites; and killed in groups. More than eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered. Then came the organisation of the cover-up: mass graves, and subsequently graves reopened using mechanical equipment to move the bodies to secondary burial sites and make identification more difficult.

This is also why, for years, families have received not a body but fragments of a body. Identification via DNA has made it possible to give a name back to thousands of sets of remains.

Genocide, then. The word here is not a matter of opinion. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced him in 2017 to life imprisonment for genocide in Srebrenica and crimes against civilians in Sarajevo. In 2021, the sentence was upheld on appeal.

The International Court of Justice, too, in a 2007 ruling, determined that what took place in Srebrenica constituted genocide. The Court did not directly attribute the genocide committed by the Bosnian Serb army to Serbia, but ruled that Belgrade had breached its obligation to prevent it. The Yugoslav leadership had very deep political, military and financial ties with the Bosnian Serbs and did not do everything within its power to stop it.

Here, Srebrenica ceases to be merely the story of Mladić. It also becomes the story of others. Of the UN, which had designated an ‘protected area’ on paper but failed to protect it. Of the Dutch soldiers, who were too few in number and too weak. Of the belated and inadequate NATO air strikes. This is one of the reasons why Srebrenica has remained a particularly painful wound in the European conscience. It happened in full view of a world that knew something terrible might happen and yet failed to prevent it.

Thirty-one years later, in Belgrade, a man attending the funeral told Reuters: “He is a hero.” And this is perhaps the part of today’s news that most directly concerns the future. Courts can establish the facts and identify the dead. They cannot force a society to turn those facts into memory. One can be condemned by history and by the law and yet continue to construct another narrative in which the perpetrator becomes a defender of the homeland and the victims become an inconvenient detail.

One can discuss the break-up of Yugoslavia, the West’s responsibilities, the UN’s mistakes, the crimes committed by other armies and NATO’s decisions. But before discussing these matters, one must know what actually happened.

In Srebrenica, in July 1995, more than eight thousand men and boys were systematically killed because they belonged to a community that the perpetrators sought to eradicate from that territory.

And so today’s photograph of Belgrade takes on a different meaning. It shows just how long a lie can live on after the facts have been established. And it reminds us why, every now and then, we need to go back to the basics. Who Mladić was. What Srebrenica was. Who those killed were. Why they were killed.