World marks 29th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide

On 11 July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the United Nations-designated “safe haven” of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Directed by their military leader, Ratko Mladic, soldiers separated over 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers, and sisters and slaughtered them.

After burying them in mass graves, they later dug them up and scattered their body parts in a bid to hide their war crimes.

The genocide was the culmination of a war which started in 1992 following Bosnia and Herzegovina’s split from Yugoslavia.

The civil war pitted Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic populations, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks.

Over a period of three years, more than 100,000 people died and some two million were forced to migrate.

In 2007, the International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest tribunal, determined that the acts committed in Srebrenica constituted genocide.

Mladic and the wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, in 2016 were both convicted of genocide in Srebrenica by a special UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Both Serbia and Bosnian Serbs have denied that the events that took place constituted genocide.

Earlier this year, the United Nations approved a resolution establishing 11 July as an annual day to commemorate the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica.

Sixty-eight nations abstained during the vote in the General Assembly, a reflection of concerns about the impact it would have on reconciliation efforts in deeply divided Bosnia.

The approval of the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica” has drawn strong opposition from Serb leaders.

On Wednesday, dozens of human rights activists held banners in Belgrade to commemorate victims of the genocide.