The entrance to the Srebrenica Memorial Centre in Potocari. Photo: BIRN.
The Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves is proposing that nishans – Muslim gravestones – be installed outside the cemetery at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre to commemorate all those whose bodies have not yet been found or identified from the July 1995 massacres.
Munira Subasic, head of the Mothers of Srebrenica, which seeks justice for the victims of the 1995 massacre, told BIRN that they had decided to launch this initiative based on a decision by the High Representative, Bosnia’s peace overseer. This stipulated that, 30 years after the genocide, families have the right to build monuments for victims who have not been found.
“We decided that we want to make nishans for these others, who have disappeared. I mean, they haven’t disappeared – the criminals know what their fate was – we should write the names and surnames of everyone that was murdered, just like the nishans for those in [the cemetery],” said Subasic.
The then High Representative, Wolfgang Petritsch, in October 2000 established the cemetery and memorial for the Srebrenica victims in the village of Potocari. His decision said the cemetery should be the burial place for those who died “whose remains cannot be identified”.
The Mothers of Srebrenica’s plan is to erect the nishans outside the cemetery as a memorial to the missing whose families are still searching for their remains 30 years after the genocide.
“[We want] to write in big letters: these are the people who were killed in 1995, we still don’t know anything about them and we haven’t found them. So I think it will be more emotional when people come and see so many people who haven’t been found. There are children, elderly people and women among them,” Subasic said.
According to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the number of genocide victims who have not yet been found is around 700.
“This number certainly includes the remains of 89 unidentified people that have been exhumed, which we have not been able to identify so far. But I would like to point out that the verification process is still ongoing and that not all genocide victims have gone through it yet, so this number is not final and may vary to a certain extent,” Missing Persons Institute spokesperson Emza Fazlic told BIRN.
Subasic said they will not rush the project, and there is no specific date for completion, so they can collect as much credible data as possible – although she hopes that it will be finished while the members of the Mothers of Srebrenica are still alive.
Verdicts from international and domestic courts have established that more than 7,000 Bosniaks were detained and executed by Bosnian Serb forces in various locations around Srebrenica in 1995 – a crime classified as genocide by international court verdicts. So far, 6,772 genocide victims have been buried in the Potocari cemetery, while 250 victims have been buried in local cemeteries at the request of surviving family members.
