Srebrenica’s search for justice

Peter Lippman
openDemocracy, 8/24/2006

The Serb massacre of around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in July 1995 remains agony to the survivors, professional challenge to lawyers and scientists, and a source of political polarisation among Bosnians and Serbs, reports Peter Lippman.

The discovery of a mass grave in August 2006 near Zvornik in eastern Bosnia containing the remains of 1,150 Bosnian victims of the Srebrenica massacre is only the most recent evidence of the scale of the atrocity perpetrated in and around the town in the days after 11 July 1995.

The larger story of the systematic killing of 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) males by Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic is now part of the established historical record (not least thanks to a series of genocide trials in The Hague); the Zvornik excavation emphasises that much of the detail, including the exact numbers murdered and their burial (and reburial) sites is still to be uncovered. As these investigations continue, however, the survivors of the massacre and the families of the victims are left to seek justice and proper commemoration as part of efforts to rebuild their lives. How do they cope, and how do these efforts relate to the way Srebrenica is being remembered and "processed" at a political level?

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