As thousands gather in the eastern Bosnian city on Monday to mark the 27th anniversary of Europe’s only recognized genocide since World War II, the crucial role women have played in forging a global understanding of the 1995 massacre is also being recognised. A permanent photo exhibition featuring portraits of the women of Srebrenica opened on Saturday at a memorial dedicated to the more than 8,000 victims of the massacre. The center in Potocari, just outside the city, is set to host an international conference of women discussing how they found the strength to fight for justice after being driven from their homes and seeing their loved ones taken away to be killed. “After surviving the genocide in which my most beloved child and my husband were killed, it was the injustice of their killers, their refusal to acknowledge what they did and to repent, that drove me to fight for truth and justice ” said Munira Subasic. he said.
10 days of slaughter
Subasic’s relatives were among more than 8,000 men and boys from the predominantly Muslim Bosnian ethnic group who died in 10 days of slaughter after Bosnian Serb forces seized the city in the final months of the fratricide. of Bosnia in 1992-95. war. Bosnian Serb soldiers plowed the victims’ bodies into hastily made mass graves, then bulldozed the sites and scattered the remains among other burial sites to hide evidence of their crimes. Bosnian women and children were herded into buses and driven out of the city. But once the war ended, Subasic and other women who had shared her fate vowed to find the remains of their loved ones, bring them back to their hometown and bury them there. To do this, they created an organization, the Mothers of Srebrenica, which engaged in street demonstrations and other actions to stay in the public eye. They demanded that the mass graves be found, the remains identified and those responsible for the massacre punished. To date, nearly 90 percent of those missing from the fall of Srebrenica have been accounted for. “People often ask us who supported us, who had our back early on. But there was no one, we did it ourselves,” Sehida Abdurakhmanovic said. “Pain is the best and hardest training, but also the most honest, because it comes straight from the heart,” he added.
The women kept coming back
Since the end of the war, Srebrenica has been in the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska, while many of its pre-war residents live in the country’s other entity, the Bosnian-Croat Federation. In the immediate post-war years, crowds of angry Bosnian Serbs did everything they could to prevent women who had lived through the bloodshed from visiting newly discovered mass graves to search for items that had once belonged to their loved ones. To intimidate them, crowds lined the streets, shouting and throwing stones at the buses carrying the women. But the women kept coming back. For a long time, they had to be escorted by NATO-led peacekeeping forces, but still, they refused to bury the identified dead anywhere but Srebrenica. Finally, in 2003, the Bosnian Serb authorities caved in under pressure and allowed the survivors to inaugurate the memorial cemetery for the victims in the city. So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been found and buried in the cemetery. The remains of 50 more victims, recently found in mass graves and identified by DNA analysis, will be laid there on Monday. Dozens of women from Srebrenica have testified before the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, helping to jail some 50 wartime Bosnian Serb officials who were collectively sentenced to more than 700 years in prison. “After my husband was killed and I was left alone with our two children, I thought I wouldn’t be able to function, but the pain kept us going,” Abdurahmanovic said. Raised in a patriarchal society, the women of Srebrenica were expected to suffer in silence and not confront Serbian leaders, who continue to downplay or even deny the 1995 massacre. Instead, they turned their lives around, forming support groups, memorializing the victims and retelling their traumas to anyone who would listen, including queens, presidents, prime ministers, diplomats and journalists. “The history of what happened in Srebrenica is written on white marble tombstones in the cemetery, which would not have existed if we had not persisted,” said Suhra Sinanovic, who lost her husband and 23 other close male relatives in the massacre. She said the Bosnian Serb authorities had underestimated the women of Srebrenica. “If, God forbid, war breaks out again in Bosnia, maybe [the Serbs] he would do things differently by letting the men live and killing the women,” he said.
