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SBS Australia
12-07-2025
- Politics
- SBS Australia
'My heart is wounded': Rukija's husband was killed in the Srebrenica genocide 30 years ago
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." Rukija Avdić cries as she looks at photos of husband and brother who were killed in Srebrenica. She says around 40 members of her extended family were killed during 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. Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic on the second day of his trial 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. 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." 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. 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." 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." LISTEN TO SBS English 05/08/2024 07:19 English 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. 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.
Al Jazeera
11-07-2025
- Al Jazeera
‘Just a few bones': 30 years on, Srebrenica still buries its dead
Potocari, Bosnia and Herzegovina – In a grassy valley dotted with white gravestones, thousands of people gathered to mark 30 years since the Srebrenica massacre on Friday. Seven victims of the 1995 genocide, some of whose remains were only discovered and exhumed in the past year from mass graves uncovered in Liplje, Baljkovica, Suljici and Kamenicko Brdo, were buried during the sombre anniversary on Friday. Limited remains of one of the victims, Hasib Omerovic, who was 34 when he was killed, were found and exhumed from a mass grave in 1998, but his family delayed his burial until now, hoping to recover more. Zejad Avdic, 46, is the brother of another of the victims being buried. Senajid Avdic was just 19 when he was killed on July 11, 1995. His remains were discovered in October 2010 at a site in Suljici, one of the villages attacked that day by Bosnian Serb forces. 'When the news came, at first, I couldn't – I didn't – dare tell my mother, my father. It was too hard,' Avdic told Al Jazeera, referring to the moment he learned that some of his brother's remains had been found. 'What was found wasn't complete, just a few bones from the skull.' Families like Avdic's have waited decades for even a fragment of bone to confirm their loved one's death. Many have buried their loved ones with only partial remains. The Srebrenica massacre was the crescendo of Bosnia's three-year war from 1992 to 1995, which flared up in the aftermath of Yugoslava's dissolution, pitting Bosnian Serbs against the country's two other main ethnic populations – Croats and Muslim Bosniaks. On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces stormed the enclave of Srebrenica, a designated United Nations-protected safe zone, overrunning the Dutch UN battalion stationed there. They separated at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters, slaughtering them en masse. Thousands of men and boys attempted to escape through the surrounding woods, but Serb forces chased them through the mountainous terrain, killing and capturing as many as they could. Women and children were expelled from the city and neighbouring villages by bus. Thousands of people attended the commemoration for victims of the massacre on Friday, which began with a congregational Islamic prayer – men, women and children prostrating in unison among the rows of gravestones. After the prayer, the remains of the victims, who have been identified using extensive DNA analysis, were carried in green coffins draped with the Bosnian flag. The coffins were lowered into newly prepared graves. At each site, groups of men stepped forward to take turns covering the caskets with soil, shovelling from nearby mounds in a solemn conclusion to the proceedings. After the remains had been buried, the victims' families crowded around the sites, wiping away their tears as an imam recited verses over the caskets. 'I will keep coming as long as I'm alive' Fikrera Tuhljakovic, 66, attends the memorial here each year, but this year her cousin was among the victims being buried. She said she is determined to ensure he is remembered and that all of the victims are never forgotten. 'I will keep coming as long as I'm alive,' Tuhljakovic told Al Jazeera. Forensic scientists and the International Commission on Missing Persons have, in the decades since the mass killings, worked to locate the remains of those killed. More than 6,000 victims have been buried at the memorial site in Potocari, but more than 1,000 remain missing. In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the events in Srebrenica and the surrounding area a genocide. Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were both convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. In total, the tribunal and courts in the Balkans have sentenced almost 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officials to more than 700 years in prison for the genocide. But many accused remain unpunished. Denial of the genocide also continues – especially among political leaders in Serbia and the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska, which was established in the northeast of the country at the start of the war in 1992 with the stated aim of protecting the interests of the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to Emir Cica, Islamic Relief's Bosnia country director, international institutions have not done enough to prevent events like Srebrenica from happening again, with similar atrocities happening in Gaza at the moment. 'When we see what has happened, for example, in Gaza, it is very painful for us because we understand this [experience],' Cica told Al Jazeera. For Avdic, Gaza is indeed a painful reminder of history repeating itself. 'Today we are burying our victims of genocide, and today in Gaza, genocide is happening, too,' he said solemnly. 'I don't know what kind of message to send; there's no effect on those in power who could actually do something.'
The Independent
11-07-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
‘No escape from despair': How The Independent reported the Srebrenica massacre
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.
BBC News
11-07-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Thirty years on from Srebrenica and communities remain divided
The silence is shattered by a guttural scream. A group of people scrabble on the ground, sifting through the soil. One of them holds up a watch they have uncovered; another, a scene on stage at Sarajevo's War Theatre is uncomfortably familiar for the audience at the world premiere of the Flowers of Srebrenica. The play reflects the grim reality of the events not just of July 1995 – but the ensuing decades of unresolved grief and divisions in Bosnia and Srebrenica Massacre remains the most notorious war crime committed in Europe since World War Two. Bosnian-Serb forces overran Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, where thousands of Bosniaks, who are mostly Muslim, had taken refuge, believing they were safely under the protection of the United Dutch soldiers stood aside as Bosnian-Serb General Ratko Mladić directed his troops to place women and the youngest children on buses for transport to majority-Bosniak areas. Then, over the following days, he oversaw the systematic murder of around 8,000 people – most, but not all of them, men and boys. Mladić's troops dumped the bodies in mass graves. But later, to cover up their crimes, they exhumed then reburied the remains in multiple a result, body parts were distributed across multiple graves, causing endless anguish for the victims' families. Many of them are still searching for their relatives' remains decades later, though DNA testing has helped thousands of families to bury their family members at Potočari Cemetery, adjacent to the former UN have been able to identify body parts through scraps of clothing or personal belongings – as depicted in scenes in the Flowers of play also reflects the apparently deepening divisions in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. While the audience in Sarajevo delivers a standing ovation to the cast and crew, in majority-Serb Republika Srpska, political leaders repeatedly deny that genocide took place at Srebrenica, despite Mladić's conviction for the offence at an international tribunal in The Hague, as well as the earlier conviction of the Bosnian-Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić."I thought that when 30 years passed, we'd come to our senses," says Selma Alispahić, the lead actress of the Sarajevo War Theatre – herself a former refugee from Bosnia's conflict. "People get tired of proving the truth that's been proven so many times, even in international courts. The story of the hatred and spinning of facts serves only the criminals who profited from the war and who want to preserve their fortune today."Genocide denial is not the only symptom of the country's divisions. The Dayton Peace agreement brought an end to the war, just four months after the massacre. But it also divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two "entities", on ethnic grounds. Most Bosniaks and Croats live in the Federation, while the majority of Serbs are in Republika is also a state-level government, with a member of the presidency for each of the three main ethnic groups. But most of the power lies at the entity recent months, Republika Srpska's president has been exploiting that to make mischief. Milorad Dodik has been pushing through legislation to withdraw from numerous national institutions, including the judiciary. This has brought him into conflict with Bosnia's ultimate power, the international High current holder of that position, Christian Schmidt, annulled the laws concerned. But Dodik refused to recognise those this year a court sentenced him to a year in prison and a six-year ban from public office for ignoring the High Representative's decisions. The verdict is currently under shenanigans have ensued – including legislation to establish a "reserve police force". The same terminology was used for murderous Serb militia during Bosnia's conflict."This is dangerous, playing with the memory of those who have experienced the 1990s," says Mr Schmidt."I see the irresponsible part of the political class playing with this. We need a clear presence of the international community on a military level – so EUFOR [the EU peacekeeping force] gets more responsibility in the sheer presence, promising people they will be supported in a peaceful manner." In the centre of Sarajevo, reminders of the anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre are hard to miss. Hundreds of people huddled under umbrellas in the pouring rain to pay their respects to the convoy carrying the remains of seven recently-identified victims who will be buried at Potočari Cemetery during the commemoration. Outside the city's shopping centres, video screens urge passers-by to "Remember Srebrenica".But just 15 minutes up the road, in East Sarajevo, there are no public references to the massacre. The Cyrillic script signs and Jelen Beer umbrellas indicate that this is Republika Srpska. And in the entity government's building, there is little enthusiasm for the state-level foreign trade minister Saša Košarac – a leading member of Dodik's SNSD party – claims that Srebrenica is used to deepen divisions and prevent reconciliation."In this country, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs were killed – and crimes were committed on all three sides. It's important, when thinking about the future, that all the perpetrators, on all sides, should be held accountable," he says."Bosniaks insist on talking only about Bosniak victims. A crime has been committed in Srebrenica – no Serbs deny that – but we have the right to point out the crimes against Serbs in and around Srebrenica."But thousands of other people are focusing on solidarity with Srebrenica. On the eve of the commemoration, the Memorial Centre and Potočari Cemetery were already busy with people paying their respects. And they cheered the arrival from around the country of groups of cyclists, runners and motorcyclists. Mirela Osmanović says this support is crucial to Bosniaks who have returned to live in the area where their family members died. She was born two years after her two brothers were murdered at Srebrenica and now works at the Memorial Centre. But the recent tensions have left her rattled."The intense atmosphere produced by Republika Srpska's leaders really disturbs us, making us feel we're not protected anymore – and we're really worried about our future.""My parents say it looks the way it looked in 1992."For Milorad Dodik, manipulating the cycle of tensions is just part of his strategy to remain in power. But for people in Srebrenica, the ongoing ethno-political games only make the healing harder.
