This week, a funeral for five hundred genocide victims marked
the 17th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia. But
with genocide-denial in the regional air, and electoral changes
and political manipulation erasing the Bosnian Muslim history of
Srebrenica, is the tragedy being both frozen and erased, when
what is needed is both remembrance and to move on? On Wednesday,
around 40,000 people gathered in Potocari, near Srebrenica, to
commemorate the seventeenth anniversary of the massacre of 8,000
Bosniak Muslims, mainly men and boys, by forces under the
command of General Ratko Mladic, in July 1995 – a massacre which
both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) have
declared a genocide, and which is widely accepted to be Europe’s
worst massacre since the second world war. As in previous years,
the anniversary is the date set for the annual burial of bodies
of the victims of the genocide that have been identified in the
previous year,