SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Thousands of people in Bosnia-Herzegovina marched on July 8 to remember the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide that led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces.
Relatives of the victims and others meet annually for the 100-kilometer march that retraces a route taken by the doomed victims.
Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb forces on July 11, 1995. Its Muslim population fled the town, which had been declared a UN "safe haven" for civilians and rushed to the UN compound seeking protection.
When forces led by Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic arrived at the UN compound, the Dutch peacekeepers handed over the base. The Bosnian Serb forces then separated out men and boys for execution and sent the women and girls elsewhere in territory under their control.
Thousands of men and boys were executed in less than two weeks, and those who tried to flee through the woods were hunted down and killed by Bosnian Serb forces. The bodies of the victims were tossed into mass graves.
The UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague established that the killings constituted genocide, and convicted Mladic and his political mentor Radovan Karadzic of genocide and other war crimes in Srebrenica.
The Netherlands later apologized for the Dutch forces' failure to prevent the genocide in the town during the 1992-95 war.
Many Serbs deny the extent of the killings, adding to the suffering of the survivors. Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik has previously called the genocide “a fabricated myth.”
In July 2021, the international high representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina at the time, Valentin Inzko, imposed a law criminalizing the denial of genocide.