The head of the UN court for war crimes committed in former Yugoslavia, Carmel Agius, who attended the July 11 Commemoration of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and the funeral for the 33 newly identified victims on Thursday, told N1 that what happened in the eastern town “should never happen again” anywhere.

Agius is the President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), the court that took over the job of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) after it closed last year.

“I remember the first time I came to Srebrenica in 2001, there was nothing here,” Agius said. “That was the saddest place I have visited in my life,” he said, explaining that the ICTY and the IRMCT have proven what happened there.

“And you can imagine how, every time I come here, these events are brought back to life again. I can feel the pain, the suffering of the victims and all they endure these days,” he said.

“My message is: this should never repeat, this should never happen again, and those who don’t care about the suffering of the victims and families and keep denying what the Tribunal confirmed need to stop it,” he said.

“They still divide this country and surely that is painful for the victims and survivors and their families, and that helps neither reconciliation nor peace,” he said.

The ICTY and the IRMCT are “the only institutions which can prove what happened in 1995, and that was genocide,” he said.