Today the world remembers the nightmare in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces invaded Srebrenica – a town in the protected area guarded by a Dutch UN peacekeeping force. Women, children and the elderly are loaded onto buses and driven out of town. 8,000 men and boys remain.
Bosnian Serb soldiers give chocolates to Muslim children to calm them down. Before that they separated them from their fathers.
They were slaughtered and buried in mass graves scattered around Srebrenica. The Dutch blue helmets become passive witnesses.
The conflict began in mid-1992, when ethnic Muslims from Srebrenica started a civil war. They declare for the creation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
However, the nightmare came in 1993,
when the Serbian army besieges the city. For 2 years, the enclave lacked food, medicine and running water as the Serbs destroyed the water supply. The state of emergency does not change when the UN declares Srebrenica a "security zone" and sends there a military contingent of 600 men equipped with light weapons. The enclave remains surrounded by units of the "Drina" Corps, which are progressively limiting the ground access of humanitarian aid.
Different international organizations provide food drop from helicopters. Until the tragic 1995 for Bosniaks came. Srebrenica was captured for six days in July 1995 by the Serbian corps. In their escape, the inhabitants of the enclave split into two - a column of 10-15,000 men marched through the forest in an attempt to reach a Bosnian army zone. The remaining 20-25,000 people remain pushed into the northernmost parts of the enclave and are surrounded by burning houses and the Bosnian Serb army.
2 days of terror, mass selective executions, massacre follow
and hideous for the 90s of the last 20th century killing of people and rapes. The Bosnian Serbs separated the men from the women and put the youngest children with their mothers on buses. They take them to “Muslim” zones. Most of the deportees survive.
Only men and boys over 13 stay in Srebrenica. Their mothers repeat the same sentences today: "they tore him from my hands", "then I heard his voice for the last time". On July 14th, Dutch military units scoured the area and did not find a single Muslim alive. The massacre of 8,000 men and children was ordered by Ratko Mladic. According to recently unearthed documents, the decision by France, Britain and the US to stop the bombing without warning the Dutch authorities may have paved the way for the Srebrenica massacre. The massacre in Srebrenica also shows the inability of the UN to deal with conflict situations. Gen. Ratko Mladic managed to take 14 Dutch blue helmets hostage. They were used as a “human shield” against the possible intervention of the West during the massacre of civilians.
The massacre provoked the intervention of the USA and NATO,
which ends the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dayton Agreement was signed. It divides the country of just under 4 million people into two parts – Bosnian – the predominantly Muslim Croatian Federation and Republika Srpska. Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Croatian Catholics continue to view each other with distrust.
The country is constantly in political chaos, which for years has blocked the reforms needed for membership in the European Union. Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the poorest countries in Europe with an unemployment rate of over 40%.