1995 Srebrenica genocide to be commemorated annually under UN resolution, amid Serb opposition

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The United Nations approved a resolution Thursday establishing an annual day to commemorate the 1995 genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, a move vehemently opposed by Serbs who fear it will brand them all as “genocidal” supporters of the mass killing.

The vote in the 193-member General Assembly was 84-19 with 68 nations abstaining, a reflection of concerns among many countries about the impact of the vote on reconciliation efforts in deeply divided Bosnia.

The resolution designates July 11 as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica,” to be observed annually starting in two months.

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The resolution, sponsored by Germany and Rwanda, doesn’t mention Serbs as the culprit, but that didn’t stop the intense lobbying campaign for a “no” vote by the Bosnian Serb president, Milorad Dodik, and the populist president of neighboring Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic.

On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serbs overran a U.N.-protected safe area in Srebrenica. They separated at least 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters and slaughtered them. Those who tried to escape were chased through the woods and over the mountains around the town.

The Srebrenica killings were a bloody climax of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which came after the breakup of the then-nation of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalist passions and territorial ambitions that set Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic populations, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks.

UK Minister of State Nusrat Ghani, right, walks with Munira Subasic, president of the association Mother of Srebrenica, center, next to the monument with the names of Srebrenica genocide victims, at the Memorial Center in Potocari, Bosnia, on May 22, 2024. On May 23, 2024, the United Nations approved a resolution establishing an annual day to commemorate the 1995 genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs. (AP Photo/Armin Durgut)

Both Serbia and Bosnian Serbs have denied that genocide happened in Srebrenica although this has been established by two U.N. courts.

Dodik, who is president of Republika Srpska, the Serb part of Bosnia which comprises about half its territory, said Wednesday on the social media platform X that the U.N. resolution is being forced on the country by supporters of Muslim Bosniaks and that it will split up the country. He suggested his government would secede from Bosnia if the resolution were to pass.

Dodik has made several such threats in the past to have the Serb-controlled territories secede from Bosnia and join with neighboring Serbia. He and some other Bosnian Serb officials are under U.S. and British sanctions partly for jeopardizing a U.S. peace plan that ended the Bosnian war.

The final draft of the resolution added a statement reiterating the General Assembly’s “unwavering commitment to maintaining stability and fostering unity in diversity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

The determination in 2007 by the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest tribunal, that the acts committed in Srebrenica constituted genocide, is included in the draft resolution. It was Europe’s first genocide since the Nazi Holocaust in World War II, which killed an estimated 6 million Jews and people from other minorities.

Germany’s U.N. Ambassador Antje Leendertse said last week that there is an official U.N. commemoration of the 1994 Rwanda genocide on April 7 every year — the day the Hutu-led government began the killing of members of the Tutsi minority and their supporters. The draft resolution aims “to close the gap” by creating a separate U.N. day “to commemorate the victims of Srebrenica,” she said.

Menachem Rosensaft, the son of Holocaust survivors who is an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that designating July 11 as the official day of remembrance for the Srebrenica genocide “is a moral and legal imperative.”

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The slain Muslim Bosniaks deserve to have their deaths and the manner of their deaths commemorated and Srebrenica was supposed to be a safe area but was abandoned by Dutch U.N. peacekeepers, leaving the Bosniaks who sought shelter there “to be murdered on the U.N.’s watch,” Rosensaft said.

Richard Gowan, U.N. director of the International Crisis Group, called the timing of the vote “unfortunate, given allegations that Israel is pursuing genocide in Gaza.”

“The vote will be an opportunity for more political theater,” he told AP. “I expect Russia and China will make a great point of asking why the U.S. and European governments are concentrating on a massacre in the 1990s rather than killings in Gaza today.”