Today it is 28 years since the genocide in Srebrenica where 8372 Bosnian civilians were murdered in a beastly way. They died after Serbian forces attacked the United Nations' “safe zone” in Srebrenica in July 1995.
Srebrenica is simply a town in east Bosnia and was a "safe area" of the UN in the 1990s, erstwhile the Serbian army imposed a siege and famine on the city, which ended 28 years ago with the worst mass execution in Europe since planet War II.
A crucial number of Bosnians from Srebrenica disarmed, sincerely believing that the UN would defend them. It should be remembered that the disarmament of Bosnians in Srebrenica by the UN was a complement to the UN arms embargo for Bosnians, which was a violation of the Bosnians' right to self-defense guaranteed under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.
In July 1995, Serbian army forces began the final takeover of the UN's "security zone", Srebrenica, an enclave that had been besieged and starved since 1992.
On 11 July 1995, during the Serbian attack on the enclave, 25,000 women, children, old people set out towards Potocari, a tiny town in the municipality of Srebrenica, where the United Nations office of the peacekeeping base was located. Most of the men gathered in Susnjari, west of Potocari, where they were preparing to scope the area controlled by the Bosnian government. But the enclave was surrounded by minefields, and the area was patrolled by the Serbian army. On the evening of July 12, around 8,000 of them passed through the junction of roads on Konjevic Polje. 16 July 6000 people were to arrive safely via Zvornik
On 13 July, the group, which was located in the hills close Konjevic Polje, surrendered to Serbian forces. The day before, July 12, the forced displacement of those from Potocari began. The Serbs terrorized there, raped and committed savage murders. Even at this early stage, any men were killed in mass graves that had already been dug. Nova Kasaba has evidence of both occasional and systematic executions. The bodies found there and elsewhere were frequently found with hands tied in the back.
The Serbs executed at least 500 Bosnians in Kravica hangar utilizing firearms and grenades. The executions in Kravicy took place late afternoon on July 13.
In the afternoon of 13 July in the Cerska Valley (west of Konjevic Polje) The Serbs shot 150 Bosnians with their hands tied (sometimes besides legs) after they were transported there by 3 buses. The executions were carried out along the road and their bodies were then extracted by a digger. On July 15, prisoners who were in Bratunac but not yet executed were transported to buildings in Pilica (north of Zvornik), and on July 16, 1200 were executed at the Branjevo military farm.
As the negotiations continued at Dayton, it became apparent that there was a request to analyse Serbian war crimes. Serbian leadership then began systematic efforts to conceal the crime of genocide. 1 of the strategies utilized by Serbian leaders to conceal war crimes was to leave a tiny number of bodies in the first mass graves. The thought was that if and erstwhile the bodies were found, only a tiny number of Bosnians (just tens alternatively than many thousands) would be found. Serb leadership ordered the excavation of the main graves utilizing digging equipment and the transport of bodies to (26) secondary graves throughout east Bosnia. An example of an intact first grave was a mass grave in the Cercian Valley, where 150 bodies were found
The effort by Serbian war crimes leaders to hide was a success, in late 1996 William Haglund exhumed all the first mass graves and located only about 500 bodies. Newsweek had an article titled “The execution Without Deadness”.
The search for secondary graves began only in 1997
The final search confirmed that on 13-17 July Serbian troops murdered over 8,000 men and boys, burying them in mass graves. Nearly 7,000 of them were subsequently identified and after their identity was established buried in the memorial cemetery in Potočari. Forensic experts from many countries had a very hard and completely traumatic task. Serbian perpetrators later reopened mass graves with dense coffers and distributed any of the corpses to alleged fresh secondary or tertiary graves. That's how they wanted to mask their crimes. The pathologists had to laboriously collect the remains from various graves and lay them back.
The "brain" of genocide operations, the political leader of Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadžić and his military chief Ratko Mladić, sought for many years, were sentenced to life imprisonment by the UN Court in Hadje However, by far the largest number of perpetrators as usual enjoys freedom. Many fled to Serbia and live there in unbreakable peace.
