Thirty years on from Europe’s worst atrocity since the Second World War, the Bosnian town of Srebrenica is still marked by empty streets, rows of graves and families who have never stopped waiting. Home to 6,000 people before the war, it now has fewer than 800 residents, as many young people leave in search of a fresh start far from Bosnia’s old divisions.
On 11 July, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in a massacre that international courts later ruled was a genocide.
Srebrenica was at the time a United Nations Safe Area, under the protection of UN troops.
Daily life in the town now revolves around the vast cemetery at Potocari, where the victims are buried.
“It’s important that Srebrenica lives – and not only on 11 July,” Nerma, a florist whose shop faces the cemetery, told RFI. She has seen the crowds shrink as fewer foreign visitors come each year to pay their respects.
Nerma, who lost relatives in the massacre, said the town still struggles with things most people take for granted.
“It’s no longer about knowing who is Bosniak or Serb. We have no bakery, no butcher, no clothing shop. If we want to do shopping for the children’s return to school, we have to go to another town,” she said.
On Friday, thousands gathered at the Potocari Memorial Centre to bury seven more victims, including a 19-year-old man and a 67-year-old woman.
Many families wait years to lay loved ones to rest because remains are often found in fragments in secondary graves.
“Before the war, there were 6,000 inhabitants. During the war, there were up to 50,000 people, and even more. Today, there aren’t even 800,” explained Sadik, a local writer who has watched the town empty, year by year.
That emptiness weighs on families who never found all they lost. “For 30 years we have carried the pain in our souls,” said Munira Subasic, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica group.
Her husband Hilmo and 17-year-old son Nermin were among those killed in the massacre. "Our children were killed, innocent, in the UN protected zone. Europe and the world watched in silence as our children were killed."
In May last year, the UN General Assembly named 11 July the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.
Many young Bosnians now choose to build their lives in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Canada or Australia. They leave behind a country still divided by old rivalries and a web of overlapping governments.
Bosnia’s power-sharing deal – the Dayton Agreement, which ended the Bosnian War – created a complex political structure, with a total of 17 governments split between the two entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Serb-majority Republika Srpska controls nearly half the land and is still pushing for independence. Bosniaks support a single, united state. Croats, the third-largest ethnic group in the country, want an autonomous region of their own.
Some young people see the conflict through fresh eyes. “Some are interested and try to understand and visit memorial sites,” Aline Cateux, an anthropologist who studies post-war Bosnia, told RFI. "They want each community, Serb or Muslim, to be able to commemorate its dead, to better move on."
She added that young people often focus more on the problems of today, such as corruption or pollution, rather than old divides.
Still, daily trust can be fragile. Small choices remind people of the past.
"From the point of view of a survivor, what trust can you place in a Serb doctor? If you are a Bosniak Muslim woman, are you really going to choose a Serb gynaecologist?" asks Cateux.
Some Serb leaders continue to reject the word genocide. “A terrible crime was committed, but it was not genocide,” Milorad Dodik, president of Republika Srpska, told a rally last week.
That denial shapes what some children learn, Cateaux said. In Serb-run areas, textbooks no longer mention Srebrenica. "In schools following the Serb curriculum, Bosniak Muslim children learn that certain war criminals are heroes."
While Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic were jailed for life by international courts, lower-level suspects are still being pursued.
Since the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia closed in 2017, which had been responsible for the prosecution of serious crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars, Bosnia’s prosecutors have taken on nearly 500 cases linked to the war, involving around 4,000 suspects. Many of them live in Serbia or Croatia, where extradition is slow and rare.
Earlier this year, Bosnian courts charged five police officers and four soldiers over their alleged roles in the killings. Around 7,000 victims have been identified and buried so far, but nearly 1,000 are still missing.
Some families are able to bury only a bone or two when remains are found.
For Nezira Mehmedovic, visiting the graves of her sons Sajib and Sinan, killed in their early twenties, brings her closer to what is left.
"I like the most to come here to my sons. I talk to them, I cry, I pray, I kiss them,” she told French news agency AFP. “My heart aches for them constantly. They say life goes on... but how?"