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Nearly a third of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s current population hadn’t even been born in 1995, yet everyone remembers that year, which left an indelible mark on the country. Yes, it was in December of that year that the war—which had begun in 1992 and left around 100,000 dead, both civilians and combatants—finally came to an end. It was the biggest armed conflict in Europe since the fall of Nazism: a tripartite war between closely related ethnic groups, so similar that their languages are more like dialects than distinct tongues, and who had all been part of the same Yugoslavia until not long before. That unity had collapsed under the weight of power struggles and territorial ambitions, with interethnic hatred and the belief that coexistence was impossible, imposed from above by the highest political spheres. Yes, it was in December 1995 when the war ended. But in July, Srebrenica happened: the worst genocide on the continent since the Second World War. And today, 30 years later, the wound has yet to heal.
That once-unified Yugoslavia had begun to fracture four years earlier, with the declarations of independence by Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia, and Bosnia. But Bosnia was a particular case—not only because it had the most ethnically heterogeneous population, but also because it was caught between Serbia and Croatia, two stronger republics that treated its territory as a prize to be won. Bosniaks (mostly Muslim), Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians), and Bosnian Croats (Catholics) each tried to create a country for their own people within the same land: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, and Herceg-Bosna, respectively. The Bosnian Serb forces of Srpska, led politically by Radovan Karadžić and militarily by Ratko Mladić, made major advances during the war—killing, conquering, and carrying out ethnic separation across the territory. That was the context in July 1995.
Srebrenica was a small, predominantly Muslim town in a largely Serb-controlled area—an enclave. For this reason, the United Nations had declared it a Safe Area, where no attacks would be allowed, especially against civilians. When Mladić’s forces arrived, they separated Muslim men aged 12 to 65 from women and children. The Bosnian Serb general spoke of combating so-called terrorism, of protecting civilians, of ensuring their safe evacuation. But that was not the case. Between July 11 and 31, thousands of women and girls were raped, and 8,372 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were murdered. The UN personnel tasked with protecting civilians were largely powerless, hindered by a legal technicality: the mission had been deployed under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which mandates observation and the separation of warring parties, allowing the use of light weapons only in cases of personal or UN property defense. That was the prevailing rule for peacekeeping missions at the time.
When Mladić’s troops started separating men from women, UN personnel sheltered civilians in their local compound, but could not handle the roughly 25,000 people gathered outside its gates. And when Mladić offered to transport civilians and remove them from the conflict zone, the peacekeepers simply agreed. They trusted him. Thus, Srebrenica became one of the defining examples of UN inaction in the 1990s—just as the Rwandan genocide had been a year earlier, where the same thing happened: those charged with protecting civilians had explicit orders not to intervene. Disobeying would have meant facing a martial court. The failure was so severe that it forced a complete rethinking of the organization’s role. Soon after, Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General from 1997 to 2006, would speak of the “Responsibility to Protect,” and by 1999 the paradigm had already shifted: in the context of the Kosovo war, NATO bombed Yugoslavia to halt attacks on ethnic Albanian civilians, without legal authorization, justified by the memory of 1990s inaction. Act first, check legality later.
The War in Bosnia ended in December 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Accords, brokered by then U.S. President Bill Clinton. These accords created a country with two capitals, two constitutions, and three presidents—one for each ethnic group. Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs, and Croats share the same legal citizenship in a country that remains deeply divided. Moreover, Dayton resulted in a de facto division that had not existed before the war, as it formalized and retroactively legitimized military gains. In other words, the territory now administered by the Bosnian Serbs reflects what they controlled in 1995, not in 1991. The previous ethnic mixture and multiethnic coexistence began to vanish. But at least the war ended.
One might ask whether it would have been better if the Bosnian Serbs of Republika Srpska or the Croats of Herceg-Bosna had been allowed to secede, much like the Albanians of Kosovo did years later. It’s hard to know, because perhaps that would have encouraged figures like Mladić or the Croat Slobodan Praljak to go even further. Praljak ended up taking his own life on live camera in 2017 after being sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The International Court of Justice confirmed in 2007 that the massacre in Srebrenica—the killing of men and boys, the separation of men and women, the forced displacement of civilians, and the abuses against women and girls—constituted genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had already reached the same conclusion back in 2001. It was that same tribunal that, in 2017, sentenced Ratko Mladić to life imprisonment. Radovan Karadžić had been sentenced to the same penalty in 2016.
To this day, there are still those who portray them as heroes, defenders of Serbs against their so-called Muslim terrorist enemies. There are also those who simply deny that the massacre ever happened. Perhaps the most prominent among them is Milorad Dodik, leader of Republika Srpska, where Srebrenica is located. A Bosnian Serb and close ally of the Serbian and Russian governments, Dodik insists that the entity he leads should be independent, despite this directly contradicting the Dayton Accords.
So, how can a wound ever heal when part of society glorifies or denies the massacre?
In 2020, marking 25 years since Srebrenica, the film Quo Vadis, Aida? premiered to critical acclaim and was nominated for an Oscar. In one scene, the protagonist, Aida Selmanagić, returns to her home after witnessing so much death and suddenly encounters one of the perpetrators, just another neighbor who went on living his life. Because yes, the leaders were convicted, but those who carried out the killings, who dug mass graves, who raped and destroyed families, the vast majority of them remain free.
Bosnia remains a broken country, institutionally fragmented, socially shattered. With separate education systems for each ethnic group, there is no unified national narrative. There are no armies clashing in the Balkan streets anymore, no massacres or bombings. And yet, the war still persists, though in a transformed state. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but in Bosnia, politics is the continuation of war. Structural violence and the ideologies and narratives that led to genocide three decades ago still endure—and they are not hard to see for those willing to look.
Time may soothe passions, but neither thirty nor a thousand years will be enough to heal when the process of reconstruction faces so many obstacles, when justice is partial, and when pre-existing conditions are legitimized. Thirty years after the worst genocide in Europe since the fall of Nazism, there is no guarantee that violence won’t erupt once again.
