Srebrenica massacre

“We were told to come to Potočari — it was safe”

By July 1995 the little enclave of Srebrenica had become a funnel for the displaced. People had fled neighboring villages for months, migrating from village to village until they were hemmed into a town on a hill with a single main road. Children who had known only war now knew a litany of survival instructions: where to queue for bread, which house might shelter the night, where the Dutch UN battalion — Dutchbat — had its compound.

Srebrenica had been declared a UN “safe area” in 1993. That label promised protection, and it brought thousands to Potočari, the UN compound on the town’s edge. In plain terms: the enclave was overcrowded, hungry and underarmed, but there was a promise behind the acronym UNPROFOR. For many, that promise was the thin difference between life and nowhere left to go.

The warning signs were not sudden. In the days before July 11 the sound of artillery grew from distant to constant. Columns of soldiers on hillsides tightened the ring around the town. Refugees continued to arrive, and the UN peacekeepers — lightly armed, with restrictive rules — pushed for negotiation over confrontation. The international community debated policy in conference rooms thousands of miles away; inside the enclave, families packed their bags.

When the town fell: July 11, 1995

In the morning light of July 11, Bosnian Serb forces moved in. They had superior numbers, armor and artillery. Dutchbat, outgunned and isolated, could not stop the advance. The VRS (Army of Republika Srpska), commanded by Ratko Mladić in operational terms and guided politically by Radovan Karadžić, entered Srebrenica and established control.

Thousands had gathered at the Potočari compound. Men with bags and children clutched to chests waited in the muddy courtyards. The Dutch soldiers tried to maintain order. Negotiations took place in a haze of fear: terms for the surrender of positions were hammered out, convoys to leave the area were organized, and assurances were proffered. But the unthinkable was already unfolding. Under the observation and sometimes direct accompaniment of UN soldiers, columns of people were loaded onto buses and trucks. Women, small children and older civilians were placed into convoys and sent toward Bosnian government-held territory.

That separation — the moment when the men and boys were pulled aside — is the pivot of the story.

The sorting: who would stay, who would go

Military and VRS personnel began to separate the population. Able-bodied men and older boys were told to step aside. In many accounts, this was presented as a security measure: fighters removed from the civilian population. What followed bore no relation to such a neutral justification.

Men were gathered into makeshift holding places: schools, warehouses, gyms and barns. They were kept in groups, sometimes bound, sometimes under guard, sometimes driven in trucks. Small knots of men tried to understand their fate, some clinging to hope that military tribunals or prisoner exchanges would be arranged. Others tried to flee into the surrounding forests, walking into a labyrinth of shelling, mines, patrols and exhaustion.

The scale was massive. Within days thousands of men and boys — estimates commonly cite nearly 8,000 victims overall — had been separated from their families and disappeared into a system that had been designed, in part, to localize and conceal their fate.

Farms, warehouses, Kravica: execution at multiple sites

Once separated, victims were moved to execution sites. Not a single field, but many — Kravica, Branjevo, Pilica, and multiple locations around Bratunac among them. One of the largest, the Kravica warehouse, has been repeatedly documented in witness testimony and tribunal records as a place where men were assembled and then gunned down.

Some executions were carried out in the open. In other instances, men were led to prepared pits and shot, their bodies stacked into graves. There were accounts of forced marches: men taken hundreds of meters or several kilometers to killing fields. Survivors later testified about hearing machine-gun bursts and cries. Those who tried to run were pursued by VRS units, hunted down by patrols, or killed by artillery and landmines in the woodlands.

The killings continued over days. Between July 11 and July 19, and in the weeks that followed, the systematic elimination of detained men and boys was carried out at a scale and with a coordination that would later be scrutinized in court.

Hidden bodies, hidden tracks: the effort to erase a crime

After the killings, perpetrators began a secondary operation: concealment. Bodies buried in primary mass graves were exhumed and reinterred in secondary graves scattered across the countryside. Heavy machinery, tractors and hurried hands moved remains into new pits — an attempt to hide the trail of atrocity.

This practice of “grave relocation” complicates the story. It was done to obstruct identification and to thwart accountability. It stretched the work of later investigators from months into years. For families, it meant the steady, damaging uncertainty that accompanies not knowing where a loved one’s remains lie.

The count: who and how many

Determining an exact death toll in the immediate aftermath was impossible. Over time, forensic teams, investigators and tribunals converged on a commonly cited figure: approximately 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically killed in and after the fall of Srebrenica. Different reports offer slightly different totals; the process of identification continued for decades, and the number of identified remains rose as secondary graves were uncovered.

International criminal courts — notably the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) — and, in 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) examined the evidence and concluded that the killings in Srebrenica met the legal standard for genocide. The ICJ also found that Serbia had breached obligations under the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent and to punish the genocide, although it did not find that the state of Serbia itself had directly perpetrated the genocide. Legal nuance matters here: the courts distinguished between the character of the crime and the question of direct state perpetration, while still holding individuals criminally responsible.

The long forensic work: bringing names back to stones

What followed the legal determinations was a painstaking, human process. International and Bosnian forensic teams — including the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) — spent years exhuming graves, matching DNA, and restoring identity to the dead. Primary graves were opened; remains were matched to family reference samples. Then, as investigators found relocated remains, identifications continued. Each name recovered returned to families a measure of closure and a place for mourning.

The Potočari Memorial and Cemetery became the place where many of the identified victims were reburied. The graves stand in ordered rows; each marker holds a name, an age, a life ended in the summer of 1995. Annual commemorations are held on July 11. These are not hollow rituals. For survivors and relatives, they are the moments when history and grief meet in public.

Accountability: trials, convictions and contested responsibility

The judicial reckoning was a slow arc. The ICTY indicted and tried multiple individuals for crimes related to the Srebrenica events. Early in the tribunal’s work, Radislav Krstić was convicted of aiding and abetting genocide. Later, prosecutions reached the highest levels: Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić were both convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by the ICTY and sentenced to life imprisonment; those convictions were upheld on appeal.

But accountability was not uniform. Lower-level perpetrators were prosecuted in national courts, and legal battles over command responsibility, intent and the chain of command stretched across jurisdictions. In the Netherlands, civil suits and administrative actions probed Dutchbat’s role. Dutch courts at different stages found partial state responsibility in relation to the handing over of men from the UN compound, a conclusion that created both legal and political reverberations in the Netherlands and among survivors.

The ICJ’s 2007 judgment, mentioned earlier, added state-level dimensions: while it confirmed that Srebrenica had been subjected to genocide, it outlined complex findings about Serbia’s obligations under the Genocide Convention — an important international legal precedent, even as debates about responsibility and prevention persist.

Memory, politics and the scars that remain

Srebrenica is not just a legal case or a forensic problem. It is a wound across the social fabric of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Entire villages were emptied of men. Families were shattered. Women and children who survived the expulsion carried trauma, and communities were permanently altered in demography and trust.

Commemoration has become a contested field in politics and public memory. For many, the Potočari cemetery and the July 11 memorial are essential acts of bearing witness. For others, political narratives around the war complicate admissions of guilt and reconciliation. Denial and revisionism have persisted in some circles, prolonging pain for survivors and families.

Internationally, Srebrenica precipitated changes in the way peacekeeping missions are conceived. The failures of UNPROFOR — insufficient mandate, lack of adequate force protection and inability to secure timely military support — were analyzed and criticized. The massacre fed into conversations that would later inform debates about the Responsibility to Protect and the design of international interventions meant to prevent mass atrocities.

The small, stubborn work of repair

Repair has come in many forms: graves reopened and names written on stones; trials that speak a criminal truth into the public record; international lessons learned about the limits of light peacekeeping against deliberate, organized atrocity. But neither tribunals nor memorials eliminate the daily labor of survivors rebuilding lives.

Identification continues. Legal questions linger. Political relationships in the Balkans still reflect the war’s old divisions. And yet every year, in Potočari beneath a gray July sky, survivors and friends gather and read names aloud. They light candles. They place flowers. Each act of remembrance is small but defiant: a refusal to let burial and disappearance be the final story.

What Srebrenica left the world

Srebrenica placed a brutal question before the international community: what must be done to stop mass killing when it is within sight but out of reach of will? The town’s fall exposed limits in peacekeeping, the risks of declaring “safe areas” without credible means to defend them, and the moral peril in tolerating impunity.

Legally, Srebrenica reaffirmed the concept that genocide can occur in Europe in the modern era and that international institutions must be capable of holding individuals to account. For families, the forensic work demonstrated that science can reach across decades to restore human names to the nameless.

But the broader lesson remains stubborn: institutions, rules and trials matter, and so do the small human acts — witnesses testifying, investigators combing fields for bones, relatives keeping a chair at a table for the missing. Together, they form the complicated, incomplete effort to remember, to indict, and to make sure that a place like Srebrenica does not become possible again.