Due to the Covid-19 situation, the Srebrenica Peace March 2020 will not be organized in the same capacity as in previous years, meaning it will count only 100 participants, organizers said Tuesday.
After the commemoration and burial of Srebrenica victims, the Peace March one of the main activities during the anniversary of the genocide against Bosniaks which gathered thousands of participants from around the world, in previous years, who wanted to pay homage to the victims in this way.
“We were forced to mark this year's Peace March only symbolically and reduce the number of participants in order to comply with the measures adopted, so we would protect our citizens. Our obligation is to respect all decisions of competent institutions, and accordingly, I want to inform you that participants of the Peace March 2020 will only be the survivors of the 1995 Death March, and their number was reduced to only 100 participants,” said Munir Habibovic, chairperson of the Peace March Subcommittee.
The Peace March is a three-day event organised since 2004 in the framework of the Srebrenica genocide commemoration. It symbolizes the preservation of memory and prevention of denial of what took place in the summer of 1995 in the eastern-Bosnian town of Srebrenica and its surroundings.
In April 1993, the UN had declared the besieged enclave of the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica a safe area under UN protection.
However, in July 1995, the Dutch battalion failed to prevent the town's capture by the Bosnian Serb forces and the massacre that followed.
More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in the days following July 11, 1995, and so far the remains of more than 6,600 have been found and buried.
The International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice later ruled that the massacre was an act of genocide.
International and regional courts have sentenced 45 people for what happened in Srebrenica to a total of more than 700 years behind bars. Those who the ICTY sentenced to life imprisonment are Ljubisa Beara, Zdravko Tolimir, and Vujadin Popovic. But the most well known alleged masterminds of what happened in Srebrenica are former Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic and ex Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, and both have been sentenced for it but have appealed.
