“This is a victory for truth and justice! We thank everyone who voted for this resolution and we wish all the people of the world to live in peace and never experience what we have experienced.”, says Nura Begovic, of the Srebrenica Women’s Association, whose brother was assassinated in July 1995 by the Serb militias of Bosnia-Herzegovina. She gathered a few friends in her living room to follow the vote on the resolution adopted Thursday May 23, 2024 by the United Nations.
This resolution, presented by Germany and Rwanda, makes July 11, the day of the fall of the Bosnian enclave 30 years ago, an “International Day of Remembrance of the Srebrenica Genocide”: a few months before the end of the intercommunal conflict that had raged in Bosnia for three years, at least 8,000 men, aged 16 to 60, had been executed by Bosnian Serb forces. While women, children and the elderly were transferred to the Bosnian lines. “We have the names of each of the victims, even if some bodies have not yet been found”adds Nura Begovic.
The resolution was approved by 84 member states of the United Nations General Assembly, while 68 abstained (notably in Africa and Latin America) and 19 voted against – including China, Russia and also Hungary. Among the abstainers, we note another member of the European Union, Slovakia led since October by the populist Robert Fico, while Israel did not take part in the vote.
Serbia strongly opposed the resolution, believing that it criminalized the entire Serbian people – an argument taken up by Russia, whose representative denounced a text “serbophobic”. On the contrary, Denis Becirovic, Bosnian member of the collegial presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, estimated from New York “that no people were collectively responsible for genocide” and that the resolution offered “a historic chance for reconciliation”.
Officially, neither Serbia nor Republika Srpska, the “Serbian entity” of 1.2 million inhabitants of a still divided Bosnia-Herzegovina, disputes the reality of the crimes. But they contest the term “genocide” and draw parallels with the crimes also committed by Bosnian forces against Serb civilians. The Serbian Orthodox Church also launched into the battle against the resolution, sounding the tocsin in all its churches at midday on Thursday. The government of Republika Srpska relaunched the secession blackmail by adopting a plan for “peaceful separation” from Bosnia-Herzegovina that same day.
