July 11 is an international day of commemoration for the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide, the largest mass killing in Europe since 1945. In mid-July 1995, over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys were murdered by the VRS, the army of Republika Srpska (RS), the statelet which Bosnian-Serbian nationalists, in conjunction with the Serbian government, had carved out of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the previous three years.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations and most states have now recognised Srebrenica as a genocide.
The RS leader, Radovan Karadžić, and VRS commander Ratko Mladić, who oversaw the massacre, are both serving life terms for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, which include Srebrenica.
The Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, who instigated the genocidal conquest of Bosnia in 1992 after a campaign in Croatia in 1991, was facing similar charges when he died in ICTY custody in 2006.
Recognition and Denial
The international recognition of the “Srebrenica Genocide” appears to contrast with the denial of Israel’s current genocide in Gaza. Yet Srebrenica was also comprehensively denied at the time and continues to be denied by Serbia.
Basic knowledge of the killings, the intention of Serbian leaders to execute so many people, and the extent of Western complicity, all had to be painstakingly exposed over many years. Karadžić and Mladić were on the run for a decade and a half before being caught in 2008 and 2011.
It was not only the international trials and the excavation of the victims’ bodies (which the perpetrators had tried to hide) which has largely overcome the denial. The determined campaigning of women survivors has also played a crucial role; although women from Srebrenica were raped and murdered in 1995, most were bussed out while their menfolk, columns of whom tried to flee the Serbian forces, were hunted down and slaughtered – some in methodical executions after being forced to dig their own graves. The Mothers of Srebrenica have been fighting for justice ever since.
Equally, the Serbian nationalists were not the only ones responsible for the Srebrenica killings. In 1993, when Serbians were already threatening to overrun the town, in which thousands of Bosnian refugees were sheltering, the UN had proclaimed a “safe area” around it.
In 1995, a Dutch battalion, commanded by a multinational UN force based in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was supposed to protect this. Yet when the VRS threatened to conquer the area, the UN failed to deploy sufficient force to prevent it.
It was Dutch peacekeepers who effectively handed over most of the men to the Serbians – causing national shame which later led the Netherlands Supreme Court to hold the state partially responsible for the killings – but Western governments, NATO commanders in Sarajevo and UN officials in New York were also to blame.
Srebrenica and the Denial of the Bosnian Genocide
While it is the ‘Srebrenica Genocide’ that is internationally recognised, the killings were the culmination of what most experts, including those at an international conference in Sarajevo last week, consider to be a larger Bosnian Genocide.
From April 1992, the Yugoslav National Army and paramilitary gangs, both under the effective control of Milošević’s Serbia, conquered much of Bosnia and largely removed the non-Serb (Bosniak and Croat) populations from the areas they annexed, through massacres, terror, systematic rape and cruelty. Much of the violence took place in concentration camps, while Serbian troops shelled and sniped at civilians in multiethnic Sarajevo, where a market massacre in 1994, the site of which I visited this week, killed 143 people.
This campaign amounted to genocide because the Serbians clearly intended to destroy the non-Serb communities in Bosnia, but the Serbo-Croat euphemism ‘etnicko ciscenje’, translated into English as ‘ethnic cleansing’, was adopted internationally and often used to avoid describing the Serbian campaign as genocide.
This term fitted the narrative, developed by Western leaders and media, that the Bosnian war was an inter-ethnic conflict in which all sides were more or less to blame. Yet although Croatian forces also attempted to remove Bosniaks from the areas they controlled, and Bosnian forces also committed war crimes, the Serbians began the genocidal war and were responsible for the vast majority of the atrocities. Western leaders, like Britain’s John Major and his foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, often denied this reality.
The Bosnian government brought a genocide case against Serbian-controlled Yugoslavia to the International Court of Justice in 1993, two years before the Srebrenica killings. Yet judges in the ICTY, in various subsequent trials, were reluctant to rule that ‘ethnic cleansing’ was genocide, and when the ICJ case was finally decided in 2007 (with Serbia-Montenegro as defendant since Yugoslavia had been dissolved), the court ruled that only in the case of Srebrenica could genocide be proved.
Even if many genocidal acts during the years from 1992 – the systematic pattern of killing, violent expulsions, rape and torture – could have been committed with genocidal intent, they said, only at Srebrenica, with its large-scale mass killing, could such intent be fully proved.
With this twisted logic – converting killing from a means of genocide into a criterion of intent – the ICJ managed to simultaneously recognise the Srebrenica Genocide and deny the Bosnian Genocide. This could be understood as a largely political decision, giving Srebrenica recognition to the Bosnians, while absolving the Serbians and especially Serbia as a state – which the West wanted to draw into the orbit of the EU and NATO – of responsibility for a larger genocide.
The campaign in 1992-93 was clearly led by Serbia, but Srebrenica could be pigeonholed as a Bosnian-Serbian crime, for which Serbia itself had only secondary responsibility.
International complicity in the Bosnian Genocide centred on the failure of the UN, NATO, the European Community and Western states – despite continuous interventions, which began in Croatia 1991, even before violence began in Bosnia – to stop Serbian and other atrocities.
The failure to honour the commitment in the Genocide Convention to “prevent” genocide was, Samantha Power famously argued, actually a “success” for US policy, since non-engagement was the policy. Denying “genocide” and talking about “ancient hatreds” were parts of a strategy to minimise Western involvement.
Eventually in 1995, after the emboldened Serbians took NATO soldiers captive as well as massacring Bosniaks, NATO finally bombed their positions above Sarajevo from which they had terrorised the city for three years, and US President Bill Clinton, worried about his re-election, gave Bosnia and Croatia sufficient support to push back Serbian forces and bring Milošević to the table.
However, in the 1996 Dayton settlement, Serbian nationalists got to keep Republika Srpska, established through genocide, as an entity within a loose new Bosnian federation. Today, its leader Milorad Dodik, with the support of the authoritarian regime in Serbia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, threatens a new secession.
Gaza: From ‘Failure to Prevent’ to Active Participation in Genocide
As Bosnia-Herzegovina continues to live with many consequences of the 1992-95 genocide, across the Mediterranean in Gaza, Israel has been committing a new one for almost two years.
Western states and media that denied the Bosnian Genocide now deny the Gaza Genocide; the indifference to civilian suffering is the same. There is, however, a huge difference in the causes of these two situations.
While the official West cared little about Bosnia, it cares too much about Israel. In 1995, the West failed to save the threatened population of Srebrenica; in 2025, it is actively helping Israel destroy the Palestinian population of Gaza.
So in the new age of genocide, denial serves a different function. During the Bosnian genocide, it was alleged that British leaders favoured Serbia and German leaders Croatia, because of traditional connections. But these were loose secondary loyalties, while the US and Western commitments to Israel are fundamental; the state is a close ally, plugged directly into the Western system of power.
Israel is using the most advanced weaponry that Western capitals can supply to pummel a helpless civilian population, while a network of influence across governments and media in all the main countries has largely silenced dissent until the last few months.
In the end, the West helped bring Serbian leaders to international justice: Mladić is currently imprisoned in The Hague and Karadžić is in Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight. In contrast, the Milošević of the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is feted by both parties in Washington and welcome, according to government leaders, in Berlin, Warsaw and other European capitals that are supposed to be committed to international law – he has just visited Greece.
In London, Israel currently has to make do with visits by other genocide-supporting ministers and Israel Defence Force commanders, but the UK has been in the forefront of Gaza genocide denial, with the BBC playing a central role.
While the Srebrenica Genocide has been commemorated – Britain held a national memorial day ceremony in St. Paul’s Cathedral last month, attended by the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner – it has also been exploited to avoid recognising the genocide in Gaza. For example, Srebrenica was added into the UK’s January 2025 Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) commemorations to show concern for wider genocide, while Gaza was treated as a catalyst for antisemitism.
On the same day, Keir Starmer said that “‘never again’ really must mean never again”, but completely failed to mention Gaza; the foreign secretary, David Lammy, even joined Israel’s ambassador Tzipi Hotoveley, an outspoken apologist for its crimes in Gaza, in HDM celebrations.
Lammy’s hypocrisy had already been exposed, when he suggested that the numbers of Gazan victims were insufficient to recognise genocide, although as a lawyer he was well aware that there is no numerical criterion for the crime, and had previously recognised Srebrenica as a genocide.
Today, even as Labour ministers criticise Israel’s starvation policy, they continue to proclaim its “right to self-defence”, as though that was at stake in Israel’s massacres of Palestinian civilians, and are banning the direct-action anti-genocide group, Palestine Action, labelling them “terrorists”.
The Neutering of International Courts
After the Bosnian genocide, Serbian leaders eventually faced justice because some international leaders had taken the initiative to establish the Yugoslav tribunal, as they did later the ICC.
Yet today, the ICC and its officials face a sustained campaign of destruction from Trump’s USA, while Europe mostly stands aside. The ICC’s prosecutor and judges have been brave enough to produce warrants against Israeli leaders, but these have not included the genocide charges that Serbian leaders eventually faced – although there is now a much wider consensus that Israel is committing genocide than there was about Serbia in the early 1990s.
It has been argued that Milošević withdrew from Kosovo in 1999 partly because of ICTY’s charges against him. Today, Netanyahu is undeterred by his ICC indictment or the provisional measures ordered by the ICJ in 2024, and so far no state has gone back to try to strengthen these.
The full ICJ genocide case, brought by South Africa, will not be heard for years, and with the depressing precedent of the 2007 Bosnia judgement, we have to worry that Israel will successfully use a ‘Srebrenica’ argument: that without a huge single massacre such as that in 1995, genocidal intent cannot be proved.
Yet, as Serbian forces did in Bosnia before Srebrenica, Israel has committed literally hundreds of massacres. Indeed, some in Bosnia think that Gaza’s genocide is even worse than the one they experienced.
Just as public opinion finally persuaded the West to act against the Serbians, so the huge shift in opinion against Israel in the last six months – in the UK and all Western countries – must surely begin to break down the wall of official complicity that protects the state.
But stopping the genocide is only the first step: then the fight for justice will begin. The Bosnian experience shows that this is likely to be a long struggle.
