Seeing Srebrenica

In his speech at Potocari Friday, the Bosniak member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s presidency, Haris Silajdzic, read the popular quote from historian George Santayana: “Those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it.”

Silajdzic was exhorting all of us there, and those who were not, to “never forget” the atrocious murder of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys on July 11, 1995, the worst act of genocide in Europe since World War II.

By quoting Santayana, Silajdzic betrayed a profoundly mistaken perception: that Srebrenica is a part of history. It is, on the contrary, not a part of the past but a part of the present. The clearest proof of this were the actual events of Friday’s ceremony, in which 307 new tabuti were buried at the memorial centre in Potocari.

Mass graves from Srebrenica are still being uncovered, the dead still must be buried, and the total number of identified victims rises every year. The genocide of Srebrenica is, in many ways, still happening.

As something that cannot yet be consigned to the legacy of history—something that cannot be simply remembered—Srebrenica struck me as something that instead must be lived year to year. In Srebrenica, Bratunac, Prijedor and elsewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina, victims live side by side with war criminals—the perpetrators of the very acts that Friday’s ceremony was intended to memorialise. Others live without certain knowledge of loved ones who disappeared during the war. Srebrenica appears representative of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the atrocities of the past reach far into the present, disturbing the personal lives of citizens day to day and warping the social and ethnic fabric of the nation.



Srebrenica was not only a ceremony commemorating the horrors of the past, but commemorating the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the present: unresolved, transitional, and hopeful for a return to a harmonious and multiethnic past. And as a ceremony of the present, Srebrenica is all the more important. It is the ground for a discussion about the problems and promises of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina that is sensitive to the immense presence of the war in its citizens’ lives. Seeing Srebrenica as a moment of the present is the best way to never forget what happened in the past.