هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
Thirty-one years after the genocide in Srebrenica, the tragedy of July 1995 has moved beyond the borders of the small town in eastern Bosnia into an international memory enshrined in court rulings and the United Nations calendar.
It has been definitively established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, or IRMCT, and the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, that what happened constituted genocide.
Major rulings were issued against Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader during the war, and Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army at the time, along with officers and security officials implicated in killing, deportation and enforced disappearance.
But judicial and international recognition did not close the file on this genocide. In Potocari, where the Srebrenica Memorial Center and the main cemetery for the victims are located, remains are still being returned for burial every year.
In Banja Luka, the political center of Republika Srpska, the Serb entity within Bosnia, and in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, the characterization of what happened remains the subject of confrontation between those who treat it as an established judicial fact and those who maneuver around the term, deny the genocide, or glorify some of those convicted.
That is why Srebrenica today remains an open file, suspended between a political struggle over memory, justice that has not been applied to all those involved, and remains that are still returning to Potocari more than three decades later.
A heavy memory complicating the political conflict
On May 23, 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution designating July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica, while condemning genocide denial and the glorification of its perpetrators. The resolution gave memory a new international anchor, while at the same time exposing the depth of the divide over the name and its meaning.
In Serbia and Republika Srpska, the resolution was presented as an attempt to collectively stigmatize Serbs, even though its text stressed the individual nature of criminal responsibility. Thus, Srebrenica entered the UN calendar while remaining, inside Bosnia, a fault line between Sarajevo and Banja Luka over the definition of the past and the legitimacy of the present.
Weeks before the UN resolution, on April 18, 2024, the parliament of Republika Srpska adopted a report denying that what happened in Srebrenica was genocide.
The danger of that step lay in moving denial from the margins of political discourse into an institutional document issued by the parliament of an entity within the Bosnian state, in direct defiance of a cumulative international judicial process. Memory in Srebrenica has therefore become a tool in a broader struggle over the nature of the Bosnian state, the powers of its institutions and the limits of the Serb entity’s authority.
Milorad Dodik, the most prominent political leader in Republika Srpska, embodies this overlap between the memory of genocide and the constitutional crisis.
After he was sentenced in February 2025 to one year in prison and barred from political activity for six years for defying the decisions of the international high representative, Bosnia entered a period of acute tension between state institutions in Sarajevo and the entity leadership in Banja Luka.
In this climate, denial of Srebrenica operates within a broader discourse that rejects the authority of the central state and invokes a narrative of Serbian victimhood and resistance to “dictates from Sarajevo” and “foreign interference.”
Serbia, meanwhile, occupies a gray area between acknowledging a major crime and avoiding its legal classification. President Aleksandar Vucic speaks of a “massacre” or a “terrible crime,” but avoids describing what happened as genocide, and strongly opposed the 2024 UN resolution.
In this sense, Belgrade and Banja Luka appear to be politically negotiating over the name, while international courts settled the classification years ago. The issue does not stop at language alone, because the word genocide is tied to responsibility, memory, public education and regional reconciliation.
In July 2021, Valentin Inzko, then the international high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, imposed an amendment to the criminal code criminalizing genocide denial and the glorification of those convicted of war crimes. The amendment entered into force on July 28 of that year.
The law created a new normative framework, but it quickly became clear that legal text alone was not enough to change the political sphere. The Office of the High Representative acknowledged that denial initially declined, then continued because of weak judicial follow-up.
In May 2025, the first conviction in Bosnia in a genocide denial case was issued against Vojin Pavlovic, head of the Bosnian Serb organization Eastern Alternative, after he glorified Ratko Mladic during an event where slogans were raised describing July 11 as the “day of the liberation of Srebrenica.” FENA then reported on June 29, 2026, that enforcement of his sentence had been postponed for the third time.
Reports by the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Center offer a broader picture of the persistence of denial as an organized phenomenon. In a 2023 report , the center documented 90 cases of denial between May 2022 and May 2023.
Its 2024 report highlighted a threefold increase in revisionist narratives and devoted a chapter to the campaign against the UN resolution on Srebrenica. In July 2025, the center described genocide denial as a “systematic threat to truth, justice and peace.”
In this way, denial goes beyond the bounds of individual opinion, operating through parties, institutions, events, symbols, statues and slogans, placing survivors in a daily battle over a truth the world assumes has already been settled.
The UN resolution gave survivors and memorial institutions a broader global framework. At a UN event in 2025, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the failure to prevent the genocide “was not an accident of history,” linking it to policies, propaganda and international indifference.
On July 7, 2026, the United Nations announced that year’s commemoration program, further entrenching Srebrenica in the UN’s institutional memory, without ending Bosnia’s internal conflict over the name and its meaning.
Major accountability, unresolved human files
After 31 years, the central judicial question is no longer the classification of the crime. That was established through a long international process, beginning with Radislav Krstic, a senior officer in the Drina Corps of the Bosnian Serb army, whose case in 2001 became the first international conviction to establish that what happened in Srebrenica was genocide.
In 2007, the International Court of Justice confirmed that the acts committed in Srebrenica constituted genocide, and that Serbia had failed in its duty to prevent it and punish its perpetrators. Krstic was ultimately sentenced to 35 years in prison, transferred to Estonia in 2025 to serve his sentence, and again denied early release in July 2026.
The rulings later reached the top of the political and military hierarchy. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader during the war, was convicted of genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and war crimes. An appeals court increased his sentence from 40 years to life, and he is now serving it in the United Kingdom.
Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army at the time, was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes involving Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo. He received a final sentence of life imprisonment and remains detained in The Hague. In May 2026, his request for early release on health grounds was denied.
Accountability extended to security officials within the Bosnian Serb army. Vujadin Popovic, the security chief of the Drina Corps, was convicted of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, murder and persecution, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He is serving his sentence in Germany after being denied early release in June 2025.
Ljubisa Beara, the security chief of the Main Staff, was also convicted of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, murder and persecution, and sentenced to life before dying in Germany in 2017 while serving his sentence.
Zdravko Tolimir, one of the top intelligence and security officials, was convicted of genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes linked to Srebrenica and Zepa. His life sentence was upheld before he died in the detention unit in 2016.
Other rulings addressed lower field-level ranks, including Drago Nikolic, the security officer in the Zvornik Brigade, and Vinko Pandurevic, the brigade’s commander, showing that accountability did not stop with political and military leaders alone.
The numbers provide a clearer picture of the limits of this accountability. On July 8, 2025, Bosnia’s Detektor platform, which specializes in tracking transitional justice and war crimes cases, published a tally showing that 54 people had been sentenced in crimes linked to Srebrenica, for a combined total of 781 years in prison.
Within Bosnia itself, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina sentenced 28 people to a combined 464 years in prison, while five cases were still ongoing when the tally was published.
These figures show that the major rulings did not close the accountability file, but rather shifted it from first-tier leaders to more detailed and slower-moving national cases. As time passes, witnesses age, opportunities to gather evidence diminish, and some suspects or witnesses die before judicial proceedings are completed.
Between the end of 2023 and mid-2025, the Bosnian prosecution filed four indictments against 22 people in cases linked to Srebrenica. But the presence of a number of suspects or defendants in Serbia complicates referral and enforcement, while Belgrade had issued six rulings in transferred cases linked to the crime by the time Detektor compiled its tally.
That is why a gap remains today between a truth established in international courts and national prosecutions moving slowly amid calculations of regional cooperation, sovereignty and the passage of time.
Early releases remain a sensitive issue for victims’ families. Alongside life sentences, the Srebrenica file includes convicted individuals who pleaded guilty or expressed remorse and were later released, such as Momir Nikolic, Dragan Obrenovic, Drazen Erdemovic and Vinko Pandurevic.
In the logic of the courts, sentence length, conduct and admission of guilt factor into implementation decisions. But in the memory of families, justice is measured by the absence of a father, a son and a brother, and by a grave that may contain only part of a body while other bones remain in an unknown place.
The still-open human face of Srebrenica is visible in the remains file. As July 11, 2026, approaches, Potocari is preparing to bury the remains of 10 genocide victims after their identities were established or their families agreed to bury the remains that had been found, while about 1,000 of the town’s victims are still missing.
Thirty-one years after the tragedy, the recurring burial ceremonies in Srebrenica encapsulate the chapters of a case whose dimensions remain unresolved. Despite the UN legal designation of the crime as “genocide,” sharp political disputes continue over its historical meaning.
It also faces a slow judicial track in pursuing the remaining perpetrators compared with the rulings issued against senior leaders, while survivors remain before a cemetery that receives new remains every year, returning to them parts of those who are gone and renewing their annual wounds without granting them a complete end to the tragedy.