Commemorating 30 Years Since the Srebrenica Genocide

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Rukija Avdić cries as she recalls the night 30 years ago when her family and home were torn apart.

It began with shouts.

Run, run! The Serbian army has entered! Srebrenica is falling! Run!

Avdić calls it “that catastrophe” — the massacre of around 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It was the largest mass killing in Europe since World War Two.

Among the dead was Avdić’s husband and twin brother.

“I don’t know which was worse, losing my brother or my husband,” she tells SBS News.

“My heart is wounded.”

An older woman with dark hair and dark rimmed glasses, wearing a brown cardigan, sitting on a brown sofa looking at a photo album.

Rukija Avdić tearfully gazes at photographs of her husband and brother, both victims of the Srebrenica massacre. She recounts losing around 40 family members to the war. Source: SBS News

She last saw them on 11 July 1995 when Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić entered the small mountain town, which was then a United Nations safe zone.

Mladić’s soldiers were later found by a UN war crimes tribunal to have carried out the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims — known as Bosniaks — who were the majority ethnic group in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time.

In 2017, Mladić was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

The fall of Srebrenica

Recalling the moment the town came under attack, Avdić says, “there were screams and cries”.

“My husband wasn’t with me at that moment. I was alone with my four children and my mother.

“When I saw and heard the screams, I ran down the stairs and quickly grabbed the children. I thought they were going to burn us alive.”

Avdić says she heard Mladić shouting and telling people to leave for nearby Potočari.

On her way there with her children, she stopped near her uncle’s home.

“When night fell, my husband appeared. He wanted to see where I was, to see the children, to say goodbye. My brother was there too,” Avdić says.

“My husband said: ‘Rukija, please, take care of yourself. Here, take this ring from my finger. Take care of the children. We may never see each other again. May Allah help you.’

“My brother said too: ‘Dear sister, I know you’re my twin, I can’t live without you, but I have to.

“He gave me his prayer beads and his prayer mat. He was very religious.”

Avdić says her husband and brother then fled to hide from Mladić’s troops.

“The kids screamed and cried: ‘Daddy, daddy, come back!’ He turned and walked into the forest. But they were ambushed there. The army was waiting for them. They were prepared.”

Along with tens of thousands of other Bosniak women and children who lost husbands, fathers, brothers and sons, Avdić was put on an evacuation bus and forcibly displaced.

After a night in Potočari, she recalls the chilling words of the man who to this day remains in prison in the Hague as a war criminal.

Middle aged man with white hair, wearing a suit, a finger pressed to his temple, a greenish yellow background, in a courtroom, with a microphone and screen visible.

The second day of the trial for Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic took place at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands in 2012. Source: SBS News / AP

“Mladić came and spoke. I saw him, heard his voice,” Avdić says.

“He said… ‘Kill, kill, only if it’s a male child, kill him.’

“I panicked. I took my headscarf and wrapped it around my son Jusuf, put him in girls’ clothes. I did the same with Halid, dressed him in traditional girls’ pants, so they would think they were girls.

“Halid was two; Jusuf around five years old. They were all so little.”

Avdić remembers witnessing massacres with her own eyes.

“When I passed through Potočari, I saw our men. They were all bound, naked. And I heard the gunshots. I witnessed a huge number of our men killed. But I still had hope that [my husband] would return. That he would come back and bring joy to his children.”

For five years, Avdić and her four young children lived in tents. They moved into an abandoned home in central Bosnia before coming to Australia in 2000.

Tents as far as the eye can see, most white, some blue. Women are hanging sheets and walking between the tents.

Refugees in the Tuzla camp, after being displaced from Srebrenica and surrounding Bosniak villages. Source: Getty / Patrick Robert – Corbis/Sygma via Getty Images

Remains found decades later

Like many of the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of Srebrenica, it wasn’t until decades after the “catastrophe” that Avdić found out what happened to the men in her family.

In 2012, she received confirmation that her husband’s remains had been found.

“It was terrible. We were heartbroken,” she says.

“My father-in-law told me I had to come to bury him. That was the hardest part.”

Two years earlier, she had also buried her twin brother.

Every year, more and more bodies are found. Even after 30 years, many haven’t been identified.

It was also difficult for children left fatherless by the genocide to bury fathers they hardly remembered.

Avdić says her son broke down seeing his father’s coffin, though he was only six when he last saw him.

“When he lowered it, he screamed. He pulled his own hair out. In that moment, he nearly went mad,” she says.

“He wanted to gather four stones to bring them back to Australia for his sisters, his brother, and himself to have something to remember that day by. To never forget it. It was very hard for them.”

A woman wearing a white headscarf mourning next to the grave of her relative, in a field of identical white rectangular vertical tomb stones.

Victims of the Srebrenica genocide are buried at the Memorial Center in Potocari, Bosnia. Source: AAP / Darko Bandic/AP

War and the collapse of Yugoslavia

The armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina broke out three years before the genocide, in 1992, amid the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina were one of six social republics that made up the former Yugoslavia.

In 1991, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia declared independence from the bloc.

Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence the following year, not wanting to remain in a country that would thereafter be run by Serbia, the largest of the republics, and its nationalist leader Slobodan Milošević.

For centuries, Serbs, Croats and Muslims across the socialist bloc lived together but when Yugoslavia collapsed, fighting broke out between the ethnic groups.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian-aligned armed forces launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the majority Muslim population, with the aim of establishing the Bosnian Serb Republic.

What became known as the Yugoslav Wars resulted in an estimated 140,000 deaths, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice. An estimated 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian War alone — most were Bosnian Muslims.

The Bosnian capital Sarajevo was under siege for nearly four years, while Bosniak villages in the east, near the border with Serbia, came under attack and mass killings of Muslims were reported from 1993.

Thousands were sent to concentration camps, where there were reports of killing, torture and starvation.

Dozens of men looking at the camera. Black and white, their shoes off and lined up in front of them.

Malnourished Croatian and Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war in Manjaca, the largest Serbian concentration camp, 1992. Source: Getty / Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty

Avdić says she had been living “a good life” in the town of Osat, about 20km east of Srebrenica, until war came to her doorstep. She was pregnant with her fourth child at the time.

“There were barricades, we couldn’t get to town,” she says.

“I went into labour alone at home. I gave birth by myself. It was very hard.”

The years of conflict leading up to the genocide were traumatic for Avdić.

“I remember the grenades the most, the fear. Then my husband went to the front line, because he had to protect Srebrenica, to defend the town. I was always afraid that someone would come to the door to take the children.

“In 1993, when I was at home, a grenade fell close to me, maybe five metres away. I was holding my child in my arms. And then I lost my hearing. The grenade damaged my left ear.”

Avdić was among the tens of thousands of people who left their homes for Srebrenica believing it to be safer.

But the enclave was frequently shelled. According to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serb forces controlled the access roads and impeded the supply of international humanitarian aid, such as food and medicine, into the town.

The UN declared Srebrenica a safe zone in April 1993 and days later called for a total ceasefire in the town, deploying United Nations Protection Forces.

Troops rotated and Dutch peacekeepers were on duty when the Srebrenica genocide began to unfold.

They were not permitted to use force except in self defence and were later found to have been partly responsible for some of the deaths in Srebrenica.

‘No peace without justice’: The war crimes tribunal

Atrocities were reported from the start of the collapse of the Yugoslav Republic in 1991, and in response, the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993.

The tribunal’s task was to prosecute those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law.

Australian lawyer Graham Blewitt AM, who had in the early 1990s prosecuted Australians believed to have participated in Nazi war crimes, went to the Hague in 1994 to become the deputy prosecutor for the ICTY, a post he held for a decade.

“There were reports coming in daily of massacres and atrocities being committed throughout the Balkans,” Blewitt tells SBS News.

When he arrived, the ICTY had barely started its work and he was responsible for setting up the tribunal.

“It was left to me to start recruiting and to set up the office,” he says.

“I relied on my experience both doing the Nazi war crimes work and my work at the National Crime Authority to design the prosecutor’s office.”

14 people posing for a photo, some wearing red judges robes, standing on white stairs.

Graham Blewitt (front right), with the judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1994. Credit: Supplied

Once set up, Blewitt says they started investigating and prosecuting war crimes.

“It was a lot of pressure … the tribunal could not fail because if it did, it would set back the initiatives that were taking place then to establish a permanent international criminal court.

“By November [1994], we had already issued our first indictment, which kept the judges very happy.”

Blewitt says while his team were “up to [their] necks” investigating many other atrocities that had already occurred, he distinctly remembers hearing reports that “something terrible” had occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995.

“Within a few days, the reports started to gather momentum and it became very clear that there was something very serious happening in Srebrenica,” he says.

At that stage, we had no idea that it was going to turn into a genocide. But we realised it was serious enough that we needed to get a team on it straight away.

Blewitt says he pulled people from other teams and formed a special investigation unit, which began gathering evidence.

With assistance from the US, the team sourced aerial imagery of mass grave sites, determining the location of victims who had been executed.

“Once the Serbs found out that we were aware of the grave sites … they started to remove the bodies from those graves, took them to more remote locations and buried the bodies in secondary graves,” Blewitt says.

“We were able to identify both the primary grave sites and the secondary sites, and we decided to carry out exhumations of the bodies in those grave sites.”

The ICTY’s investigations quickly established that Mladić and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić were primarily responsible for the killings and took steps to indict them.

“Towards the end of 1995 after Srebrenica happened, it was quite clear there was a genocide, and the international community set up peace talks in Dayton [Ohio],” Blewitt says.

But there was concern a peace treaty might see Karadžić and Mladić evade accountability, so the ICTY issued their indictments in November.

“Our view was that you can’t have peace without justice and they were the primary persons responsible for the genocide, so they had to be prosecuted.”

Defining genocide

Both Karadžić and Mladić were found guilty of war crimes and genocide in 2016 and 2017 respectively and handed life sentences. They remain in prison in the Hague.

In 1999, then Serbian president Slobodan Milošević was charged with a total of 66 counts of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes across Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, becoming the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal.

Milošević was found dead in his cell in the Hague while on trial in 2006.

Older, largish man with white hair, wearing a casual patterned shirt, at a desk with papers on it, holding up a piece of paper.

Graham Blewitt holding the indictment for the Slobodan Milošević, then the Serbian President, in 1999. Credit: Supplied

The ICTY determined the mass killings of Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica constituted the crime of genocide.

“Just looking at the definition of genocide, that there has to be the intent to destroy in whole or in part a political, ethnic, or religious group,” Blewitt says.

“Looking at Srebrenica, what the Bosnian Serbs were trying to do and in fact did do, was to kill all the men and boys from Srebrenica, and there were thousands of them.

In our view that met the criteria for the definition of genocide and that then led to the charge genocide being brought.

The tribunal ultimately indicted a total of 161 individuals.

“[All of them were] either arrested, stood trial, some were convicted, some were acquitted, some died. But at the end and certainly in my point of view it was a complete and utter success,” Blewitt says.

“Something I’m very proud of being able to have been involved in.”

Remembering the victims

Commemorations are being held around the world this week, including in Potočari, Bosnia, and by Australia’s Bosniak community.

Kissing the photos of her husband and brother, Avdić says it’s important to tell their stories, so future generations know what happened in Srebrenica.

“It’s for my children, and my grandchildren,” she says.

“Because my heart, it can never be young again. It destroyed my best years, my youth. I was only 29 years old.”

This story was produced in collaboration with SBS Bosnian.