Srebrenica woman recognized for emphasizing the 1995 genocide | Genocide News

They were people who lived in a world where husbands, sons, brothers, uncles and nephews were slaughtered.They were the people who fought to not deny or forget the truth of what happened to the world Srebrenica..

To commemorate the 27th anniversary of the only recognized genocide in Europe since World War II, as thousands of people gathered in towns in eastern Bosnia, women helped build a global understanding of the 1995 genocide. The important role played is also being recognized.

A permanent photo exhibition of portraits of women in Srebrenica was held on Saturday at the Memorial Center dedicated to more than 8,000 victims of the slaughter.

The Potočari center, just outside the town, will hold an international conference to discuss how she found the power to fight for justice after witnessing a woman being expelled from her home and her loved one being killed. ..

“After surviving the genocide in which my beloved child and husband were killed, the injustices of their murderers, refusing to admit and repent of what they did, fought me for truth and justice. I let him do it, “said Munilla Subasic.

10 days of slaughter

Subasic’s relatives are mainly Muslim Bosnian people who died in a 10-day slaughter after the town was attacked by Bosnian Serbian troops in the months following the end of the 1992-95 murder in Bosnia. I was among the more than 8,000 men and boys in the group. war.

Bosnian Serbian soldiers rushed to cultivate the bodies of the victims in a mass grave, then dug up the site with a bulldozer and scattered the wreckage in other burial grounds to hide evidence of the crime.

Bosniak women and children were stuffed into buses and banished from the town. But as soon as the war was over, Subasic and the other women who shared her fate found the remains of their loved ones and promised to bring them back to their town and bury them there.

To do that, they created an organization, Srebrenica’s motherEngaged in street protests and other actions to catch the public eye.

They found a mass grave, identified the body, and demanded that the person responsible for the slaughter be punished.

To date, nearly 90 percent of people reported missing since the fall of Srebrenica have been described.

“We are often asked who supported us and who supported us early on. But it wasn’t anyone, we did it ourselves. “Sehida Abdurahmanovic said.

“Pain is the best and most difficult education, but it’s also the most honest because it comes directly from the heart,” she added.

The women continued to return

Since the end of the war, Srebrenica has been located in the Bosnia entity run by the Republika Srpska, and many of the prewar inhabitants live in the other entity of the country, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Shortly after the war, an angry crowd of Bosnian Serbs did their best to prevent bloody women from visiting the newly discovered mass graves and looking for items that were once owned by their loved ones.

To intimidate them, the crowd lined up along the street, yelling at the bus carrying the women and throwing stones.

But the women continued to return.

For a long time they had to be escorted by NATO-led peacekeepers, yet they refused to bury their identified dead outside of Srebrenica.

Finally, in 2003, Serbian authorities in Bosnia forgave under pressure and allowed survivors to open a memorial cemetery for the victims of the town.

To date, more than 6,600 bodies have been found and buried in graveyards. The bodies of an additional 50 victims, recently discovered in a mass grave and identified by DNA analysis, will rest there on Monday.

Dozens of Srebrenica women testified in front of the former Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal and helped put prisons near 50 wartime officials of Bosnian Serbs.

“After my husband died and spent time with my two children, I thought I couldn’t function, but the pain kept us moving,” Abdullah Manovich said.

A Srebrenica woman who grew up in a patriarchal society was expected to suffer in silence and not stand up to Serbian leaders who continued to downplay or deny the 1995 massacre.

Instead, they changed their lives, set up support groups, commemorated the victims, and communicated trauma to the Queen, President, Prime Minister, diplomats, journalists, and anyone else who was willing to listen. rice field.

“The history of what happened in Srebrenica is written on the white marble tombstones of the memorial cemetery. It wouldn’t have existed unless we insisted,” slaughtered her husband and 23 other relatives. Suhra Sinanovic, who lost in, said.

She said Serbian authorities in Bosnia had underestimated women in Srebrenica.

“If God had forbidden, it might have been another war in Bosnia. [the Serbs] By keeping men alive and killing women, things will be done differently, “she said.