ON July 13, 1995, in one of the last acts of the 42-month Bosnia war, General Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb force, which for two years had besieged the enclave of 40,000 Muslims, attacked. It was an easy, bold and brutal conquest that shamed the international community. It is what happened next that earned Srebrenica its grim place in history. Fearful of a commander who had earned a reputation as a vengeful psychopath, the males of Srebrenica fled to the hills and the forests, trying to make it to the safety of Tuzla. Over 10 days, almost 8,000 of them were rounded up and shot. It was the worst massacre in Europe since the Nazi era.
Years of forensic work and exhumations followed. Many of the victims are now buried at a special site. The UN's war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia and the international court of justice have both established as a juridical fact that the massacre was an act of genocide, the gravest crime there is — and the hardest to prove.
— The Guardian, London
