Commemoration for the Srebrenica genocide victims, marking the 25th anniversary of the mass killings of Bosniaks in the eastern Bosnia, will for the first time display the footage that an American reporter made in early 1993 right before the UN declared Srebrenica a safe zone, said Srebrenica Memorial Centre acting general manager Emir Suljagic.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, organisers said this year the commemoration would take place via video link, enabling foreign officials to send messages or address the guests directly via video link or a recorded video message. No other changes to the schedule have been made and the event will be held on July 11, as in previous years.
The religious ceremony and prayer for the victims will take place on the site, in accordance with the prescribed epidemiological measures and instructions issued by competent institutions.
But, this year's commemoration will include special content, including the projects carried out in cooperation with the Centre for Post-conflict Research and the War Childhood Museum.
The footage and images made during the early 1990s in and around Srebrenica, which will be displayed during the commemoration, are the proof that the Bosniaks were killed even before July 1995 i.e. in 1993, said Suljagic.
They were made by an American reporter during March and April 1993, according to him.
“Our own programme called ‘12 days of memories’ will be presented on our website and social networks as of July 6, the date when the attack on Srebrenica started. We will describe the events for every day that followed, we will include various interviews,” he said.
“By the end of this or at the beginning of the next week, we're going to publish a huge project we designed with the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, containing the stories of the children of the war who are grown-ups today. The archive material will be available to everyone, and the project includes 100 persons. The project will serve to anyone researching genocide,” Suljagic explained.
The project called ‘Genocide through court verdicts’ is aimed to raise the awareness in Bosnia and Herzegovina that there are “still many of those who were involved in the crime and have not been punished yet,” he added.
“If the institutions in charge of that, such as the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, won't do that, then the Memorial Centre will and it will remind the public about it,” he said.
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the eastern Bosnian enclave and rounded up the town’s Muslim Bosniaks, separated men from women and little children and systematically executed some 8,000 men and boys.
The bodies of the victims were dumped into numerous mass graves in the area. Forensic experts excavated them and identified the bones through DNA analysis before returning the bodies to the families. Those rebury them every year on July 11 at the Memorial Centre’s cemetery.
Two international courts, the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) later ruled that the massacre was an act of genocide.
