Srebrenica Genocide Commemoration - July 11th
by Samantha Lakin
One of the world’s most infamous international crimes took place thirty years ago, in a post-cold war Yugoslavia that lay shattered into five countries. In one, Bosnia, although the population was religiously and culturally integrated, Christian Orthodox Serb military officers rounded up 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the farm town of Srebrenica. They jammed 25,000 women, children, and elderly onto trucks and buses that dropped them off at tents on a tarmac in Tuzla, one hundred miles away.
Over the next three days, the soldiers massacred the left-behind men and boys, covering their bodies in mass graves. They did not admit what had happened, leaving victims with agonizing uncertainty about whether their family members were dead or alive.
In 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ruled that the two commanding officers at Srebrenica committed genocide. This is one of the few cases where an international court has proven genocidal intent.
Even in their dread and grief, the women of Srebrenica were determined to uncover not only the bodies but also the truth. Among the persevering leaders were the “Mothers of Srebrenica.” Their focus: shared humanity with accountability, but without collective guilt.
For two years, Swanee Hunt, US Ambassador to neighboring Austria, had campaigned in Washington for American intervention to stop the war. Following a flawed peace agreement brokered four months after Srebrenica, she continued to work with Bosnian women, organizing the first commemoration of the dead and the missing.
Unexpectedly, military leadership of the occupying US forces refused to provide security for the event unless the mothers of the perpetrators were invited as well. When Hunt apprehensively presented this demand to the bereaved Muslim women, she was stunned to hear: “Invite them.” But why? They responded: “We are all mothers.”
Three decades later, Ambassador Hunt recalled that the willingness of the women to humanize the enemy took on universal importance. Not only was their humanity and humility key to success in their local efforts. It also energized a burgeoning model for women in conflicts worldwide.
Despite their own trauma, the women of Srebrenica had gone on to carry a gargantuan load: advocating for essential psychological care for other victims; organizing public protests that demanded the truth about their missing boys and men; convincing international actors to fund women’s multi-ethnic start-up businesses; providing grim legal evidence as they identified corpses of their family members; and establishing Women’s Courts based on the testimony of survivors to create restorative rather than retributive justice.
The Mothers of Srebrenica’s support of victims spans generations. Munira Subašić, head of the Mothers of Srebrenica Association stresses how the women collectively raised more than 5,500 children whose parents were murdered or missing. Subašić directly connects the desire for these children to feel love, hope, and to experience success as adults with ongoing struggles for truth and justice that all victims deserve.
Even with the significant load they bore in Bosnia, the women joined trailblazing victims from Rwanda, Latin America, South Africa, and elsewhere, to create wider pathways to justice in the wake of war. Just after the genocide in Srebrenica, they were escorted to the UN’s historic 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing. Their presence eventually led to the drafting and ratification of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which required every member nation to promote the active participation of women in preventing, ending and recovering from conflict.
Today, countries across the world are backsliding into policies that undermine and exclude the effectiveness of women across conflict lines. Governments including the US, are rolling back expressed commitments to the tenets of UNSCR 1325. Reversing hard-won policies risks alienating women whose influence is much-needed in post-war rebuilding processes and whose experiences inform sustainable peace after conflict.
Bosnian women’s impact will continue, with or without formal mandates. In the past three decades these women have shown the world the power of humanizing the enemy and employing creative, bold, and unconventional forms of diplomacy. Their work is a form of “soft power” nations should not dismiss in the future. Their example offers an antidote to violence, one that also imparts justice, truth, and recognition for victims of the genocide in Srebrenica and far beyond.
Samantha Lakin, PhD, is a specialist in comparative genocide and a Senior Fellow at The Center for Peace, Democracy, & Development (CPDD) at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The author writes in her personal capacity as a genocide scholar, and her views do not necessarily represent those of her current employer.