Srebrenica, 30 Years On: A Call for Education, Remembrance, and Lasting Justice

Content warning: violence, death and rape.

Sarajevo, March 2026. The capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina is hunkering down for a final cold snap before spring takes hold. Snow dusts the surrounding hills, but the ground in Sarajevo is dry and clear.

Across from the Vijećnica, or Sarajevo city hall, sits a small white house called Inat kuća. The house of spite.  It was built in the seventeenth century, and in 1892, it sits in the way of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The house is owned by Benderija, an old man who has lived in Sarajevo all his life. Benderija’s small white house is exactly where they’d like to build their new city hall, reclaiming their presence in a city controlled by the Ottomans for hundreds of years. They offer him the worth of the house. Benderija refuses. They offer him more. He refuses again.

He likes his house as it is. The only compromise he’ll accept is if they take his house, brick by pain-staking brick, and rebuild it on the opposite side of the road. The Austro-Hungarians, desperate, agree.

The house is rebuilt, just as it was, on the other side of the Miljacka river. Behind it, houses creep up the mountain, piling on top of each other until they disappear into mists and clouds. And so it is that this small white house defies an empire, and comes to be known as Inat kuća. Our guide, Cibra Suvad, explains that in Bosnian, inat doesn’t just mean spite, it means courage and resilience, too.

I’m part of a delegation of thirteen journalists, creatives and third sector specialists from Scotland, here with Beyond Srebrenica to learn about the 1990’s genocide. Over two million people were displaced by the breakdown of Yugoslavia, and being in the middle, Bosnia and Herzegovina witnessed the worst of the violence.

The country is made up of three ethnic groups: Muslims (Bosniaks), Serbs, and Croats. Today, the country is divided into two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, made up of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and Republika Srpska, populated by Bosnian Serbs.

The current state formation was forged through extraordinary violence, including the first genocide committed on European soil since the Holocaust. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed over 8,000 Muslim men and boys under UN protection in Srebrenica.

Our delegation is here to learn what lessons we can take from the genocide to prevent it from happening again. During each part of the trip, the spirit of inat shines through.

Now entering: Republika Srpska

As our bus passes the Inat Kuća and drives through the long tunnel at the edge of the city, we leave Sarajevo and enter another world. I understand immediately how the city remained under siege for so long in the 1990’s – this stone tunnel is a bottleneck, one way in, one way out.

Thick snow blankets the sparse landscape. The noise of the city, an electric hum of tram lines and bustling markets, is gone. A radio switched off, not even static to keep us company.

Blue, white and red flags line the lampposts. A sign proudly reads in Cyrillic and English: You are now entering the Republic of Srpska.

All the reading I’ve done has not prepared me for this moment of clarity: we are in ethnically cleansed territory. According to the Guardian in 2016, the 2013 census revealed that “…more than 81% of Republika Srpska’s inhabitants today are ethnic Serbs.” It’s hard to find up to date data on the scale of the displacement, because tensions are still so high that conducting a census has proved impossible in recent years.

We drive on through the thick snow, headed west. By the side of the road, buildings sit empty, desolate windows staring out at the landscape. The sides of the walls are pockmarked with bullet holes, and several roofs have collapsed.

The version of the war we see is sanitised, made clinical by the snow, and deadly quiet. The echoes of blood and screams are long buried. Despite living amongst its ruins, the genocide has managed to kill even the memory of itself among Bosnian Serbs. A final act of violent forgetting.

We stop off at a gas station and debate whether or not we should take off our Srebrenica flower badges. We’re on our way to the Srebrenica Memorial Center, in the heart of the western part of Republika Srpska, close to the border with Serbia.

Our bus makes another stop at Potočari. On the right, there are industrial blocks, nondescript buildings I wouldn’t have looked twice at had our guide not pointed them out.

Here, Suvad says, is where some of the men from Srebrenica were driven. They were packed inside these warehouses like sardines, and then Bosnian Serb forces tossed in grenades and opened fire.

Today, the outer façades of the buildings have been remodelled. Nothing is there to mark the massacre. In fact, less than 50km further down the road, there’s a monument to Serb soldiers lost during the war. History does not just happen, it is made and remade by the present. And in Republika Srpska, the genocide did not happen.

As the bus keeps going, we reach the Potočari Memorial and Cemetery. Thousands upon thousands of grave stones like white fence posts line the grass, as far as the eye can see. The bus keeps driving, but the graves go on and on. The sheer scale makes it impossible to ignore. And yet.

At the Srebrenica Memorial Center, we hear the same story of genocide denial. The centre is run by Bosnian Muslims, many of them survivors of Srebrenica and atrocities across wider Bosnia. Almasa Salihović, herself a child in Srebrenica in 1995,  leads us through the exhibitions. We ask her about the center’s origins, and the decision to build it in Srebrenica itself, where the genocide happened.

“We want the local Serb population to come and learn about it,” she says, “and I really hope that they do. I’m not scared of the war criminals, I’m scared of their children.”

Almasa is one of many returnees that we meet on the trip. Annex 7 of the 1995 Dayton Accords states that:

All refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin. They shall have the right to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of hostilities since 1991 and to be compensated for any property that cannot be restored to them.

Despite this, it’s obvious why few feel safe to return to the places and people that forced them out. Bakira Hasečić and her daughter were raped repeatedly in their home in Višegrad, and when Bakira returned, she found that the men who attacked her had been promoted to the police. As if they deserved to be rewarded. One said to her, “Have you come back so that we can finish what we started?”

Bakira founded the Association of Women Victims of War in 2003, and hunts down war criminals across Europe to bring justice to survivors. The work that they do is not just supplementary to international justice, it’s central. In a world which would rather look the other way, Bakira’s work forces European courts to take action. She has returned to Višegrad now, and in her spare time, tends to her garden. Despite it all, survivors are blooming. A rose with sharp thorns. Inat – spite with courage.

Fadila Efendić is one of The Mothers of Srebrenica, who in 2007 sued both the United Nations and the Dutch government for failing to protect civilians in Srebrenica.  Her husband and son were murdered in 1995 along with over 8,000 others. Fadila greets us with tales of her younger days, and how she’s made a life for herself in Srebrenica since the war. She runs a shop across from the cemetery, and has returned to the home her husband built for her. Despite it all, she refuses to give up her home and her business. Inat.

Another woman who we didn’t meet but only heard of – in 2000, Fata Orlović returns to her home in Konjevic Polje, 12 miles east of Srebrenica. A Serbian Orthodox church stands where her house should be. After a twenty year legal battle, the European Court of Human Rights rules in 2019 that the church be demolished and damages paid to her family. The land is hers. Her home is her own, inviolable. Inat.

In 1995, Nedžad Avdić is only 17 years old. He joins the death march from Srebrenica to free territory in Tuzla with his father and uncle. In the chaos of the column, he loses his father. He and his uncle are captured, and brought to a remote location near Zvornik in the north of Bosnia. Every last man in that truck is shot with their hands behind their back. The truck rolls away to fetch another load of victims.

Nedžad, bleeding from his abdomen, right arm and left foot, hears the calls of another survivor. He crawls on his belly and unties the other man, who, minimally wounded, is able to drag him to safety. They watch from the trees as Serb forces bring another group of Bosniak men to the killing field.

In 2026, Nedžad tells us all of this in a hotel reception room in the heart of Srebrenica. He lives there now with his wife and daughters.

“People think I’m crazy to come back here, but there was something deep inside me that needed to come back, just to see it. And then it was a week, two weeks, a month. And then I met my girl, now my wife…”

In a place where Bosnian Muslims were systematically killed and displaced, existence is resistance. Inat. We ask him if he’s worried for his safety. He says,

“It’s not individuals who are spreading hatred, it’s from the top-down. It’s the politicians, it’s the propaganda. And this next generation, they have more hatred even than the wartime generation. That’s why this education is so important.”

The current mayor of Srebrenica, Miloš Vučić, denies that the events of 1995 constitute a genocide. In 2025, instead of attending the 30 year anniversary ceremony, he organised a counter-ceremony in a Serb majority part of his municipality remembering Serb victims of the war.

In Republika Sprska in 2026, it’s clear that grappling with the genocide is a very one-sided effort.

Moving on from war and genocide

The concept of inat doesn’t translate directly to the English, but the closest concept we have is ‘spite’. It takes incredible courage and resilience for the survivors to relive their experiences for an audience, again and again. They do it because they know, more than anyone, what’s at stake if tensions erupt into violence again.

Though none of them owe anyone forgiveness, they know that further polarisation hurts them more than it helps them. The Association of Women Victims of War represents and prosecutes all ethnicities. Bakira says, “A war criminal has only one name: a war criminal.” Almasa Salihović hopes to welcome younger Serbs into the Memorial Centre, waiting with open doors to pave the way for a safer childhood in Srebrenica than the one she had.

Amidst genocide denial and funding cuts to key education and justice organisations, there is a real risk of these stories being lost. The Association of Women Victims of War have had to scale back their work and reduce their staff to stay operational – they only need roughly £35,000 to operate annually.

When we ignore history, we are doomed to repeat it. At Beyond Srebrenica, we’re campaigning to add the Srebrenica genocide into the curriculum for Scottish schools. There’s a lot that we can learn from Srebrenica – both in how we treat marginalised groups in our own communities, and in how we intervene in conflicts abroad.

The parallels between Bosnia and Gaza have taken my breath away. Failure to deliver aid to starving civilian populations. Weaponisation of international Islamophobia to justify mass killings. The utter inadequacy of the United Nations.

However, for Bosnian Muslims living in Republika Srpska, this is not only a history lesson to be applied elsewhere. It’s the survivors of one generation’s tragedy desperately trying to prevent the tragedy of the next.

Moving on from the Srebrenica genocide does not mean forgetting it; moving on means truth, it means justice, and it means education.

Find out more and support our work at Beyond Srebrenica.

A huge thank you to our guide, Cibra Suvad, our delegation leaders Sabina Kadić-Mackenzie and Julie Adair and to Almasa Salihović, Fadila Efendić, Nedžad Avdić, and Bakira Hasečić, for your time.

Robyn Barclay, Trustee