Thread by @fascinatorfun

Bosnia is still finding bodies from a genocide some leaders claim never happened - The Washington Post washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/…

“SREBRENICA, Bosnia — The gravestones stretch for nearly a quarter mile — 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, slaughtered in a matter of days — but the region’s top politician says the coffins are empty.”

“The local mayor has said some of the purported victims are still alive. The commander who led the massacre is portrayed as a hero on posters that periodically appear near the cemetery.”

The denialism is a crime upon a terrible war crime exacerbated by the Bosnian Serb leader Millard Dodik, who has called the massacre a “myth” and a “deception” leading the UN to intervene.

Division and corruption is rife. Unemployment high.

Despite the denials Srebrenica is one of the most thoroughly documented genocides in the world, a crime scene stretching for some 40 miles across Bosnia with its epicentre in Srebrenica. A gathering point for 40k Bosnian Muslim refugees supposedly protected by UN peacekeepers

That did not stop the massacre by the Bosnian Serb army commanded by Ratko Mladic, who separated the women from the men and boys who were massacred and buried in mass graves, but, when it became clear the war might end exhumed and scattered, dumped in remote sites

7k people buried were identified but the remains of 1k people have yet to be tied to identities.

Some of the remains are stored in 2 prefabricated labs north of the site labs where bags of bones and belongings are stacked floor to ceiling

Unbearably sad.

The denialism seems obscene and in July the UN intervened using powers granted to it at the end of the war.

“In an interview, Valentin Inzko, the U.N. envoy who drafted the genocide law, said he acted after seeing an “explosion of denialism” that the country’s leaders had seemed incapable of stopping.”

“Inzko said he knew there’d be political blowback and described how he’d felt the need to test his convictions before coming to a final decision. So one day before signing the law, he left Sarajevo before sunrise and drove into the countryside.”

Two hours later, he was alone amid the gravestones of Srebrenica.

“You could feel the presence of those men and boys, my God,” Inzko said.

The law was made

Most assumed the situation would be better by now. There was a period when the atrocities were acknowledged by leaders of Republicans Srpska, releasing a landmark report.

But 3 years ago the Republicans annulled the report, replacing it with one that played down the atrocities. Posters of Maldivian appeared. All provocations driven by a local, Russian funded Bosnian Serb nationalist group.

Nevertheless are signs that the law is working with a reduction in genocide denial from Bosnian Serb accounts in recent months

But misinformation is still appearing in Serbian accounts and Dodik, at a recent nationalist celebration, stood next to a recently released war criminal

Russia has called for the envoy position to be scrapped.

Worth remembering, today, as Russia invades parts of the Ukraine, that it has designs elsewhere too,

Despite all this there has been signs of goodness & reconciliation alongside the bitter denialism

Bosnians helping the renovation of Croat Catholic Churches. People who once shot at one another now friends

But Dodik is a malign force these days, altho’ not always so regarded

Meanwhile the painstaking search for the identity of those massacred continues through the work of forensic anthropologist Dragana Vucetic, the latest victim, a 34 yr old whose skull and torso were found in different mass graves, being identified through DNA.

In another bag we’re Khaki trousers caked in mud, a thick, tattered shirt, a left shoe.

The family will be invited to identify it and then another burial and gravestone will join the others in Srebrenica.

It seems important that we should make these deliberate acts of respectful remembrance to acknowledge the horror of the massacre and genocide to counteract the denialism and commit, again, to a determination “Never again”.

Especially today when a new wave of war is building on the Russia/ Ukrainian borders.