‘No escape from despair': How The Independent reported the Srebrenica massacre

Independent

11-07-2025

It has been 30 years since more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, in the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.
The massacre occurred as Bosnian Muslims attempted to flee the town, which was captured by Bosnian Serb forces in the closing months of the country's 1992-95 inter-ethnic war. Most of the victims were hunted down and summarily executed as they tried to flee through forests. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves and later reburied to hide evidence of atrocities.
The International Court of Justice and the UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague have ruled that the killings were genocide.
Reporters on the ground in Bosnia were not able to reach Srebrenica itself, which had been under siege by Bosnian Serb forces for three years.
CNN's Christiane Amanpour recalled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum how when she arrived in the region in 1993, two years before the massacre, she found a beseiged town she could not enter.
'So we waited outside, and they brought out truckloads of wounded,' she said.
CBS news correspondent Barry Peterson only learned that genocide had occurred when he heard the stories of refugees in camps days after the massacre.
The Independent had several journalists covering the atrocities at the time, based in Bosnia, Serbia and London. Below, we look at how it was covered in this newspaper.
On this day 30 years ago, The Independent's then defence correspondent Christopher Bellamy covered the advancement of Bosnian Serb forces into the town of Srebrenica.
Two days earlier, Bosnian Serb forces began the takeover of Srebrenica under the order of Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Serb Democratic Party. He was found guilty of committing war crimes, including genocide, during the war in Bosnia.
Over the course of three days, Bosnian Serb forces intensified shelling of the enclave, which had been under the protection of around 600 lightly armed Dutch infantry troops. It fell on July 11, with Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic - who was also convicted for war crimes and genocide in 2017 - entering the town with Serb camera crews that afternoon.
On July 13, news of the horror that was to be inflicted on Bosnian Muslims was beginning to filter through. The Independent's front page carried the headline: 'Torment of Bosnia's fleeing civilians'.
The story, written by then Europe editor Tony Barber, describes how all male Muslims over 16 were to be screened by Serb forces for 'possible war crimes' in the nearby town of Bratunac.
Two days later, the Independent's Saturday edition ran a dispatch from Reuters reporter Zoran Radosavljevic with the headline: 'Muslims' flight brings no escape from despair'.
Radosavljevic spoke to female refugees who fled Srebrenica as it was shelled by Serb forces. 'Some have arrived with tales of killing and rape which have been staples of the civilian plight throughout the Bosnian war,' he wrote.
On July 16, The Independent on Sunday's defence correspondent Christopher Bellamy filed a harrowing dispatch from the Bosnian city of Tuzla, where many of the relatives of the Srebrenica victims fled.
One woman, named Ajka Husic, recalled seeing her 19-year-old son 'being put on display by Serbian conquerors'.
'I saw him, I saw my son captured and lying there with his hands tied behind his head,' she told our correspondent.
At the Tuzla airbase, where more than 13,000 women and children gathered, Bellamy wrote: 'There were not enough blankets to go around. No toilets, too few doctors and medicine, not enough water.'
He concluded his dispatch by writing: 'It was the kind of scene which, 50 years after the Second World War, Europe did not expect to see again.'
Two weeks after the massacre took place, former Independent reporter Robert Block filed a dispatch from the Serbian border entitled 'Mass slaughter in a Bosnian field knee-deep in blood', which was splashed on the front page of the newspaper.
Writing from the Bosnian Serb-controlled town of Bratunac, he wrote: 'One Serb woman who claimed to have seen the main execution site, a playground in Bratunac, spoke of a field 'knee-deep in blood'. And the killings are said to be continuing. 'It is terrible what they are doing.''
On July 21, The Independent's comment page carried a powerful column from Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as former US president Jimmy Carter's national security adviser from 1977 to 1981.
His column was written as a 'speech that might have been delivered immediately after the fall of Srebrenica if the post of Leader of the Free World was not currently vacant' - a clear dig at former President Bill Clinton.
The piece calls the Srebrenica massacre a 'defining moment', and condemns Serbian forces for 'ethnic cleansing' and 'massive brutality'. It includes a call for US air power to 'strike, effectively and repeatedly, against Bosnian Serb concentrations of heavy weaponry' and command centres.