- History class at Memorial Centre of Potočari with official guide
- Visit Memorial Centre at Potočari
- Visit Museum of “Srebrenica Genocide – failure of international community”
- Learn personal stories and stories of in-base mass grave and other elements of importance related to overall story of Srebrenica Genocide
REMEMBERING SREBRENICA (starting from Sarajevo)
In the spring of 1993, the United Nations Security Council declared Srebrenica the world’s first internationally protected “safe area.” With Bosnian Serb forces poised to over-run the enclave of 60,000 Bosnian Muslims, the world body promised to demilitarise the town and deploy UN peacekeepers to protect its inhabitants.
By July 1995, only 400 lightly armed and poorly supplied Dutch peacekeepers remained in the town. When Serb forces launched a major offensive to take the town on 6th July, the Dutch forces deployed requested NATO air strikes twice to halt the Serb advance. UN commanders repeatedly rejected the requests. On 11th July 1995, the request for bombing was finally approved but it was too little, too late. The enclave fell to Serb forces on the afternoon of 11th July 1995.
The commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, Gen Ratko Mladić, entered Srebrenica and triumphantly declared to a Bosnian Serb television crew that he was going to take revenge for the “rebellion of the Dahijas,” an 1804 Serb uprising in the Srebrenica area that had been brutally suppressed by the Ottoman Turks who ruled the region at the time.
The peacekeepers and about 5,000 refugees, mostly women and children, retreated into the UN base, while thousands of others gathered outside. The refugees inside the base were eventually expelled into the hands of waiting Bosnian Serb troops, who started forcibly busing people out, separating the men and boys from the women.
Fearing a massacre, thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys tried to make the thirty-mile trek from the fallen enclave to Bosnian government controlled central Bosnia. Mladić’s troops blocked roads, carried out ambushes, and used stolen UN vehicles and uniforms to trick Bosnian Muslims into surrendering.
Over the next ten days, Serb forces executed over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica.
