Remembering Srebrenica

It’s almost 25 years since the atrocity at of Srebrenica, the last massacre on European soil. It’s not the kind of event that anyone will be too keen to remember: we quite rightly salute D-Day veterans, a reminder of those whose sacrifice led to the freedom we have today. But it’s worth remembering Srebrenica too – it offers a shocking case study in how a perfectly peaceful community could be almost destroyed when forces of xenophobia, racism and imperialism are allowed to proceed unchallenged.

I was in Sarajevo recently to listen to the stories about that massacre. It’s one thing to know the details – over 100,00 killed in the Bosnian conflict (80,000 of them Bosnian Muslims), more than 10,000 in the city itself and 8,000 men and boys slaughtered over the course of three days in July 1995 in and around Srebrenica. But like the numbers killed in Stalin’s gulags, the statistics can be hard to take in.