Some thirty participants have joined a traditional, 200-kilometre long walk from the northern Bosnian town of Odzak to Srebrenica, in the east of the country, to honour the victims of the 1995 genocide and attend the July 11 commemoration.

They set off for the journey on Monday morning, to arrive in Srebrenica a day prior to the event.

“It is not hard to honour the victims in this way. We have been doing so for years now, adn prior to the pandemic we took some demanding routes from Zagreb via Vukovar to Srebrenica in 2018, or from Dubrovnik to Srebrenica in 2019,” said organiser, Nihad Alic, the head of the ‘Footsteps of peace Odzak’ association.

The participants from Odzak will join the traditional Peace March in the Nezuk village.

According to Alic, this year is special because all those who join the walk will spend the Eid together on their way to Srebrenica.

“We would like to draw attention in this way to the sufferings so that the evil happens never again to anyone,”, he noted.

Odzak residents traditionally organise peace walks to Srebrenica but also to Vukovar, the site of mass killings and destruction during the war of the 1990s in Croatia. Also, symbollically, the flower of Srebrenica and the tower of Vukovar are exposed in this Bosnian town on the days of the two anniversaries.