Reflections thirty-one years after the Srebrenica genocide
Three decades after the Srebrenica genocide, the fundamental questions have been answered. We know what happened. We know who is responsible. We know that the genocide has been legally established by international courts, historically documented, and morally recognised as one of the darkest chapters in modern European history.
Of course, there are still those who deny it, downplay it, or even glorify its perpetrators. Their existence is neither insignificant nor harmless. Every act of genocide denial is a renewed assault on the truth and a source of fresh pain for the victims' families. Such denial must always be confronted with facts.
Yet, after more than thirty years, another question emerges: How much more time and energy should we spend trying to convince people of facts they have long since resolved to ignore? These individuals fail to see the terrifying selfishness of passing their own guilt down to future generations, teaching them that international verdicts are mere conspiracies and that the victims are a fiction. By dodging accountability, they strip their descendants of their right to truth, dignity, and the chance to build a healthy relationship with the past. Consequently, these generations will be forced to shoulder the burden of crimes they did not commit, left without a moral compass and with a warped sense of justice. They will grow up imprisoned by their parents' convictions—a confinement that may last far longer than the sentences of the Hague convicts themselves. Sadly, this burden will not be theirs alone; it will weigh heavily on everyone living alongside them.
For those who truly care about this society: Without abandoning the fight against denial, we must redirect our focus toward another question that concerns our future.
The primary lesson we can draw from this experience is that peace can never be taken for granted. Societies that have endured aggression and mass violence carry a unique duty to remain vigilant, knowing that, under the right conditions, history can repeat itself. It is vital to recognise these conditions early and have a collective response ready. It is important to build and nurture institutions that safeguard peace, uphold democratic values, remain fiercely sensitive to hate speech, and expose policies designed to divide us and make us view one another as threats. We must never be caught off guard again.
Yet, this responsibility does not rest solely on our shoulders. No matter how prepared we are, no society can prevent violence in isolation, and no nation can secure lasting peace alone. We are bound by international dynamics, political relations, and the decisions of other actors that lie far beyond our control. History teaches us never to turn a blind eye to policies that once again frame territorial ambitions, threats, and brute force as legitimate political tools. It is equally vital that we refuse to engage with the hollow arguments deployed by deniers whose only goal is to strip the truth of its meaning.
We must not lose sight of the fact that we live in a world where logic feels entirely absent, where double standards have become the norm, and where might makes right; where the voice of reason is routinely drowned out by the sound of explosions, corruption is on display everywhere, and the killing of children has become an everyday occurrence to which the world simply closes its eyes... Insecurity is omnipresent because people no longer see institutions that stand up for justice. Compounded by a crisis of functionality, the United Nations is also facing a financial crisis that further erodes its authority. In such a world, small countries are reduced to silent onlookers—mere collateral in a game of geopolitics and corporate interests.
Yet, unlike that global arena where our influence is deeply limited, there is a space that depends entirely on us. It is the choice of what we will do with the experience we carry, and who we will become because of what happened to us. More precisely, it is up to us to decide whether our trauma will keep us trapped in perpetual pain, fear, trauma, anger, and resentment, or whether it will forge within us a deeper sense of responsibility and a profound reverence for the value of human life—both our own and the lives of others.
The past is immutable. The future is not.
Societies that have endured profound evil sooner or later face three questions.
The first is historical: What happened?
The second is legal and political: Who is responsible?
History and international courts have already provided clear answers to the first two.
Yet, there remains a third question, perhaps the most difficult of all: What will we become because of what happened to us?
The answer to this question will not change the past. It could, however, decisively shape the future.
The question demands far more than mere remembrance; it requires moral imagination and accountability. It challenges us not to let the experience of our own suffering become a prison from which we view the world, but rather a reason to rethink our understanding of humanity, violence, and our responsibility to future generations.
I remember that during the days of living under the siege of Sarajevo, I rarely thought about how the years we were enduring would one day become the subject of international courts, historical analyses, academic research, and books. We were left to fend for ourselves, our hands tied… yet the arms embargo could not strip people of their courage or their belief in the righteousness of self-defence. We were no strangers to the feeling of being abandoned by the world, but we kept living. It was a day-by-day existence, where each morning felt like a distant and unpredictable future. The greatest personal battle was to preserve normalcy, to preserve sanity. It was not just a struggle for physical survival, but a fight to safeguard our own humanity as well. It was clear that the attackers did not aim merely to destroy the city and kill us. They wanted to "stretch our minds," as the war criminal Ratko Mladić notoriously put it. Every day, they tried to shatter the way people saw one another, to erase the very concept of humanity; to make a human being cease to be human in the eyes of another, to turn neighbours into enemies, and to make one’s different name a threat and a reason for hatred. Surviving was difficult; remaining human perhaps even more. Yet, against all odds, so many survivors succeeded. This was a monumental victory for Bosnia and Herzegovina, but it is also an ongoing battle for the local people—the fight for their own identity. This is what makes everyone in Bosnia and Herzegovina who resisted aggression in any way, even by simply choosing to stay, a hero.
From my own wartime experience, I remain convinced that memory holds no intrinsic value; its true worth is measured solely by how it reflects in our present.
If remembrance does not make us more responsible, more just, and more sensitive to the suffering of others today, then it becomes a mere ritual. It may preserve the past, but it fails to help us in the present or guide us toward a better future, for coming generations at least.
The deepest purpose of memory is to help us become better, more compassionate human beings and to understand, above all, that the ultimate defeat is to become exactly what our enemies were.
Since the dawn of time, it has been clear that humanity possesses an equal capacity for both good and evil. Civilisation progresses not when evil vanishes, but when people actively choose good despite their experience of evil, recognising this choice as the greatest victory of the civilised mind.
The experience of suffering does not inherently produce morality. It does not automatically make one better or more righteous. While suffering can deepen empathy, it can just as easily breed fear, resentment, or the belief that one’s own pain carries greater moral weight than the pain of others. Trauma is by no means a teacher of morality; it merely creates the crossroad of choice.
One must not ignore a harsh, almost cruel law that psychologists have understood for decades.
The psychology of trauma has long warned that the experience of violence does not necessarily end when the violence stops. If left unacknowledged and unaddressed, trauma continues to shape how an individual perceives themselves, others, and the world.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that children raised in violent homes are statistically more likely to perpetuate patterns of violence themselves. This is not because violence is hereditary, nor because they are doomed to this fate, but because unresolved trauma often distorts how a person understands human relationships.
Of course, analogies between the individual and society have their limits. Societies are not people, and history is not psychotherapy. However, it seems that the experience of collective trauma raises a question that we cannot afford to ignore.
History is replete with moments where a society's own history of suffering failed to prevent it from inflicting injustice upon others. This is precisely why no collective trauma guarantees moral progress. It can become a wellspring of deeper empathy, but it can just as easily lay the groundwork for new forms of exclusion, a sense of victimhood, or the justification of violence.
Perhaps no example demonstrates more starkly that trauma alone guarantees no moral outcome than the fact that just three years after the Holocaust, the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people, the Nakba began, marking the catastrophic displacement and enduring suffering of the Palestinian people.
Let’s also consider Liberia, where former slaves returning from America (Americo-Liberians) established a ruling elite that would discriminate against the indigenous majority for decades; or the Serbs, who were victims of the genocidal policies of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) during World War II, and yet became the perpetrators of genocide in Srebrenica in the 1990s...
Trauma does not choose between good and evil; it only increases one’s responsibility to choose.
This is why the experience of one's own suffering can never be a guarantee of morality. It does not grant a society a privileged moral status, nor does it make it immune to committing injustice. Its ultimate value depends entirely on what we choose to learn from it.
In this sense, perhaps the greatest legacy of Raphael Lemkin lies in his understanding that genocide is not merely the mass killing of people. For Lemkin, it was an attempt to destroy the very fabric of a community: its language, culture, institutions, family bonds, memories, and its fundamental right to exist as it is. When international law codified this crime for the first time after World War II, it laid the foundation for modern international criminal law and the United Nations Genocide Convention. Through Lemkin's tireless work, a phrase was forged that was meant to serve as humanity's moral vow: Never again! These words were not born out of utopian or historical optimism, but out of a profound moral obligation of humanity to recognise and halt such horrors before it is too late.
"Never again" was an expression of a permanent responsibility for humankind. The fact that history has repeatedly failed to live up to these words does not absolve us of our duty to remain faithful to them. On the contrary, each new tragedy serves as a stark reminder of how vital this obligation remains—not only as "never again to Bosniaks," "never again to Jews," or "never again to Serbs", but never again to even a single human being. Never again!
This is why we must not fall prey to the delusions of today's hypocritical world, nor surrender what our own lived experience has taught us. That experience must never become a bargaining chip in influence peddling, nor an alibi for silence when evil strikes someone else. Our experience is not a badge of moral superiority; it is strictly a moral obligation. This obligation strips us of the right to be indifferent to the suffering of others; instead, it demands that we be the loudest voice against it. When we view memory this way—not as a rigid ritual, but as an anchor for our character and morality—we consciously protect our capacity for empathy.
Our voice matters, because we are among those who stood at the very edge and looked directly into the abyss of civilisation.
Today, the true measure of who we are is found in how we react to the slaughter of children, civilians, medical workers, and journalists. It is measured by how we respond to the forced displacement of people, the destruction of homes, camps, schools, and hospitals, the weaponisation of hunger, the wiping out of entire families, and the unprecedented stripping of human dignity that we witness in real time through our smartphones.
It is entirely irrelevant whether this is happening in Europe, Asia, or Africa. It does not matter if it concerns the Rohingya, Ukrainians, the people of Congo or Sudan, or a land whose very mention still causes discomfort for so many—Palestine.
Human suffering is a universal language. Those who have endured it can read injustice in the eyes and voices of others…
When our own experience fails to make us recognise the pain of others, it is the clearest sign that we have failed to turn that experience into wisdom.
For decades, we have witnessed this wisdom, inspiration, and greatness in the mothers of Srebrenica, and the mothers of all Bosnian Srebrenicas—be it in Prijedor, Foča, Višegrad, Zvornik, or Sarajevo…
You will find no call for revenge in their words. This is never a sign of weakness; it is an expression of fierce determination and their way of fighting the hardest battle of all for truth, justice, and dignity.
You could never hear signs of hatred in the words of the late Hajra Ćatić, a mother who passed away without ever finding the bones of her son, Nihad, but only an unshakeable conviction that peace can only be built on truth. She is just one of many. They are our guideposts, our examples, and the living proof that the opposite of hatred is not oblivion, but a dignity that refuses to surrender truth and justice.
They are our answer to the question: What will we become because of what happened to us?
The adjudicated genocide in Srebrenica, like all the crimes across Bosnia and Herzegovina, was an attempt to rob a society and a people of their future.
The only true answer to that attempt is not just to remember, but to defend and preserve our own dignity and the dignity of every human being. That, in my view, is the ultimate heroic act.