Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia
Ethnic cleansing was at the heart of the Bosnian war and genocide right from the earliest days.
24/06/2021
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Ethnic cleansing was at the heart of the Bosnian war and genocide right from the earliest days.
On 6th April 1993, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 819, declaring that Srebrenica and a 30 square mile area around the town was a United Nations Safe Area. The UN promised the people of Srebrenica safety and security. Their promises fell through as genocide began.
It belies the imagination: the horror of a mother as she tries in vain to protect her daughters from the attack of brutal, vicious soldiers. Elmina Kulašić pays tribute to her mother, and all the mothers of Bosnia.
50 years after the Nazi decree that Jews should wear the star of David, Bosnian Muslims were ordered to wear white armbands, as they were marked for execution.
Over the course of just three years, torn by a rising wave of ethno-nationalism , the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disintegrated into five successor states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (later known as Serbia and Montenegro). Click on the interactive map to see how this unfolded.
Following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, leaders utilising ethno-nationalism rose to power across the region The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, founded in 1943 during
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, David Rohde, explains the Srebrenica genocide within the wider context of the Bosnian War.
It is said that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For some women in Bosnia, the stages are on loop. For every time a woman thinks she has buried the remains of her husband or her son, another piece of him resurfaces, and she must re-live the anguish all over again.
The world first learned of the concentration camps in Bosnia after British Journalist Ed Vulliamy broke the Omarska story. An emaciated Fikret Alić appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, and suddenly, the realities of a hidden genocide became apparent.
A timeline mapping the history of Bosnia & Herzegovina.
The name Srebrenica has become synonymous with those dark days in July 1995 when, in the first ever United Nations declared safe area, thousands of men and boys were systematically murdered and buried in mass graves.
