The Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial Center in Bosnia and Herzegovina will commemorate the 31st anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide on July 11. This year, the remains of 10 victims of the genocide, aged between 20 and 56 at the time of their deaths, will be laid to rest during the annual collective funeral. According to the joint Bosnian government and international Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the victims were innocent civilians killed in the areas of Vlasenica, Zvornik, Bratunac, and Srebrenica. Their remains were recovered years later from various mass graves. “Once again, a father will be laid to rest beside his son, a brother beside his brother, a relative beside a relative,” the Institute’s spokesperson said, underscoring both the scale of the genocide and the enduring suffering of families who continue to bury their loved ones more than three decades after the crime.
At the same time, high-ranking officials in Serbia and Republika Srpska, together with politicians, journalists, and segments of the public, continue to deny that the genocide was committed, and even celebrate crimes. They have called it a “fabricated myth,” questioned the reported number of victims, and accused survivors of making “tombstones in Potočari for living people,” referring to the location of the Srebrenica Genocide memorial-cemetery.
To some, such rhetoric may appear to be little more than attempts to evade responsibility or examples of populist historical revisionism. For survivors of the Bosnian Genocide such as me, however, they represent a renewed process of dehumanization and targeting.
No `Safe Area’
The Srebrenica Genocide is widely recognized as the worst atrocity committed in Europe since World War II. In July 1995, after Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladić overran the United Nations-designated “safe area” of Srebrenica, more than 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were systematically separated from women and children, and executed over the course of several days.
Their bodies were dumped into mass graves, often using bulldozers, in an organized effort to dispose of the victims and conceal the crime. In the following months, Bosnian Serb forces systematically excavated many of the primary mass graves with heavy machinery and transported the remains by truck to numerous secondary and tertiary mass graves, often located dozens of kilometers away.
Victims of the Srebrenica Genocide have been recovered from 87 mass graves and nearly 1,000 secondary, tertiary, and individual graves. In many cases, the remains of a single victim have been recovered from three or four different mass graves, often located dozens of kilometers apart. Families often wait for years before consenting to burial, hoping that future excavations will recover additional remains and allow their loved ones to be laid to rest with more complete skeletal remains.
One particularly devastating example is Senad Beganović, who was only 14 years old when he was murdered during the Srebrenica Genocide. His partial remains were first exhumed in 2000 from the primary mass grave at Glogova, near Bratunac, while additional remains were later recovered from the secondary mass graves at Zeleni Jadar (in 1998 and 2007) and Budak (in 2005). He was formally identified by his brother in 2013 and laid to rest at the Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial Center in 2014, where he was buried beside his father. At the time of the burial, however, only about half of Senad’s skeletal remains had been recovered. As his brother later explained, the family nevertheless decided to bury him, unwilling to wait any longer in the hope that additional remains might one day be found.
Like thousands of other Bosniak boys in 1995, Senad had joined what has become known as the Death March (“Put Smrti” in Bosnian) — the desperate attempt by about 15,000 Bosniak men and boys, and a small number of women and children, to reach Bosnian government-controlled territory around Tuzla by crossing forests and mountains after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995. Senad fled together with his father, but neither survived the journey.
Those who did survive the Death March often spent days, weeks, and in some cases even months hiding in the wilderness to evade capture. Along the way, they encountered the bodies of hundreds of murdered Bosniaks — fathers, brothers, sons, relatives, friends, and neighbors. Many survivors later recalled that one of the most painful moments came after reaching safety in Tuzla, when they had to tell waiting families that their loved ones would never return.
Fight for Truth and Memory
While many survivors, including my own family, continue to search for the remains of their loved ones, the struggle for truth and justice continues. More than 7,500 persons remain missing from the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including around 1,000 victims of the Srebrenica Genocide.
And yet, outspoken proponents of genocide denial have flourished. The most prominent has been Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, one of the most influential political figures in Bosnia for more than two decades, serving at different times as prime minister and president of Republika Srpska (the majority Bosnian Serb entity created by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war), as well as the Serb member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Throughout his tenure in these offices, he has consistently denied, trivialized, or distorted the Srebrenica Genocide while simultaneously glorifying convicted war criminals and portraying Bosniaks as a threat to the Serbian people and to Europe.
An important effort to confront genocide denial and the glorification of war criminals came on July 23, 2021, when the Office of the High Representative (OHR) — the international institution responsible for overseeing the civilian implementation of the Dayton Agreement — amended the Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina to criminalize the public approval, denial, gross trivialization, or justification of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Rather than curbing denial, however, the amendments triggered the most severe political and constitutional crisis in Bosnia since the end of the war, fueling a sustained campaign of institutional obstruction and renewed efforts by Dodik for the de facto secession of Republika Srpska. Dodik, then the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, rejected the new legislation, declaring that it would “never be accepted” in Republika Srpska. He doubled down on his denial of the Srebrenica Genocide by launching a petition asserting that position. He described the law as “the final nail in the coffin of Bosnia and Herzegovina” and asserted that Republika Srpska had “no choice but to launch the process of dissolution.”
Over the following years, Dodik and the National Assembly of Republika Srpska, dominated by his Alliance of Independent Social Democrats political party, undertook a series of legislative and political measures aimed at the de facto secession of Republika Srpska (also known as the RS) from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The confrontation escalated further in June 2023, when the RS National Assembly adopted legislation declaring that decisions of the High Representative would no longer be published or implemented in the entity. Six days later, the Assembly effectively rejected the authority of the country’s Constitutional Court.
These measures directly challenged the constitutional order established by the Dayton Peace Agreement. As a consequence, Milorad Dodik was prosecuted before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which in February 2025 found him guilty of defying the rulings of the High Representative and sentenced him to one year of imprisonment, together with a six-year ban on holding the office of President of Republika Srpska.
During this persistent denial and trivialization of the Srebrenica Genocide, Dodik employed racist Islamophobic slurs against Bosniaks, calling them “converts” “without the capacity and character,” part of a “subject nation” not capable of “nation building.”
This rhetoric intensified significantly after Dodik’s removal from office following a final judgment. During the campaign for a snap presidential election in Republika Srpska, called by the Central Election Commission for that November to fill his seat, even as he initially refused to step down, he increasingly used anti-Bosniak, Islamophobic, and dehumanizing language that he had employed so often in years prior and that, for many Bosniaks, closely echoed the narratives of hatred and incitement that preceded the atrocities of the 1990s.
Revival of the Islamic Threat Narrative
Throughout the campaign, Dodik repeatedly portrayed Bosnia and Herzegovina as an unviable state and warned against what he described as the further “Islamization” of the country. Referring to Bosniaks purchasing apartments in majority-Serb East Sarajevo, he called them “amoebas that multiply and spread uncontrollably.”
By reviving dehumanizing and biologically essentialist depictions of Bosniaks, Dodik reproduced one of the central ideological tropes that had been used to legitimize exclusion, persecution, and ultimately genocide during the 1992–1995 war. In 1993, Biljana Plavšić, then serving as party vice president to wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, claimed that Bosnian Muslims were “originally Serbs” but had become “genetically deformed” through their conversion to Islam and that they are “a genetic defect on the Serbian body.”
Though some of the Serbian nationalist leaders spewing such bile, including Karadzic, were later convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes against Bosniaks, Dodik would later pick up and amplify their rhetoric. In April 2025, he declared that “Muslims should return to their old Orthodox faith,” arguing that Bosniaks were originally Serbs who had converted to Islam under Ottoman coercion: “Let the Bosniaks return to the Orthodox faith, and Bosnia and Herzegovina will become majority Serb. Then we can build a state together.”
Throughout this period, Dodik consistently portrayed the serious legal and constitutional crisis he had created as persecution of Christians by Muslims. He claimed that Western governments sought to enable Muslims to dominate Bosnia and Herzegovina “at the expense of Christians” and revived wartime narratives depicting the country as a breeding ground for Islamic extremism and Bosniaks as an inherent security threat to Europe and the West. These claims are not supported by the historical record. Rather, they reproduce false narratives used during the 1992–1995 war to legitimize the persecution, ethnic cleansing, and ultimately the genocide of Bosniaks.
For instance, Radovan Karadžić repeatedly claimed that “the Muslims” sought to transform Bosnia into “a springboard for Islamic penetration into Europe.” In a 1994 interview with the Washington Times, he claimed that the war had been “imposed on the Serbs,” who allegedly faced a choice between being “submerged by the Muslims with their high birth-rate” and seeing “Serb Christian civilization collapse in the face of an ever-encroaching militant Islam,” or “fighting back.” He similarly declared that “the West will be grateful to us one day because we decided to defend Christian values and culture.”
These narratives now have been incorporated into official documents issued by the authorities of Republika Srpska. In May 2026, Republika Srpska submitted to the United Nations Security Council what they portrayed as a report on the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like previous submissions made in parallel with the reports of High Representative Christian Schmidt, the document challenges the legitimacy of the Office of the High Representative and reproduces narratives portraying Bosniaks as proponents of Islamic domination while depicting Republika Srpska as the last bulwark defending Christianity and Europe from an alleged Islamist threat. It “warns” that “the prospect of total Bosniak domination of BiH causes the Serbs and Croats great fear and anxiety — and indeed it should concern much of Europe, because there are significant pockets of radical Islam in the Bosniak community.”
Particularly concerning is Dodik’s promotion of these narratives on the international stage, including in the United States, seeking to reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator. He has claimed that “thousands of Serbs were murdered in Srebrenica,” while dismissing the well-established and documented death toll of more than 8,000 murdered Bosniak men and boys as “a stereotype that no one has proven.”
The Dangers of Reality Reversal
These denialist and celebratory narratives are not only deeply humiliating for survivors and the families of victims; they are also profoundly dangerous because they invert the historical record and portray the perpetrators as victims. The reality is precisely the opposite. Much of what is today the Republika Srpska entity consists of territories that were ethnically cleansed of their non-Serb, predominantly Bosniak Muslim population through systematic campaigns of persecution, mass killings, deportations, rape, and destruction, as in the case of Srebrenica and my hometown of Višegrad.
Before the war, Višegrad was an ethnically diverse town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Bosniaks constituted approximately 63.5 percent of the population and Serbs about 33 percent. By the 2013 census, the municipality’s population had declined from 21,199 to 10,668. By then, Bosniaks accounted for only 9.8 percent of the population, while Serbs comprised 87.5 percent, illustrating the enduring demographic consequences of the campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out during the 1992–1995 war.
Višegrad was the site of some of the most brutal atrocities, including murder, torture, mass rape and the burning to death of more than 120 civilians, mostly women and children, in June 1992. Of more than 13,000 Bosniaks who lived there before 1992, approximately 3,000 were killed, while nearly all the rest were expelled in what has become known as a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Many victims were executed on the town’s iconic Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge, the 16th-century Ottoman bridge immortalized in Ivo Andrić’s book “The Bridge on the Drina.” Survivors recalled seeing bodies — some lifeless, others still barely alive — floating down the turquoise waters of the Drina River, turning it red with blood during the summer of 1992.
In July 2009, the ICTY convicted Milan Lukić and his cousin, Sredoje Lukić, of crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war committed in Višegrad, including the atrocities at Pionirska Street and Bikavac. The court sentenced Milan Lukić, the leader of the White Eagles (also known as the Avengers), a Bosnian Serb paramilitary group operating in Višegrad that worked in coordination with local police and military units to carry out a campaign of terror against the Bosniak civilian population during the 1992–1995 war, to life imprisonment. In the case of Sredoje Lukić, a police officer before and during the war and a member of his cousin’s paramilitary group, the court found that he substantially contributed to the Pionirska Street house burning. He ultimately was sentenced to 27 years. Delivering the judgment, Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson observed, “In the all too long, sad and wretched history of man’s inhumanity to man, the Pionirska Street and Bikavac fires must rank high,” emphasizing the exceptional brutality, premeditation, and cruelty of trapping defenseless civilians inside burning houses and leaving them to die in unimaginable agony.
Although Milan and Sredoje Lukić were not charged directly with sexual violence, the judgment nevertheless documents rape and sexual violence as integral components of the broader campaign of persecution, ethnic cleansing, and terror carried out against the Bosniak civilian population in Višegrad.
In a manner strikingly similar to the narratives later advanced by Dodik and other officials of Republika Srpska today, Milan Lukić sought to reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator. While serving his life sentence, he published a book in Serbia entitled “Confession of the Prisoner of The Hague.” In it, he portrayed the crimes he and members of his White Eagles unit in Višegrad committed — including murder, rape, and torture — as “Muslim terror” allegedly perpetrated against Serbs in another town, Goražde.
Despite the overwhelming body of evidence — judgments of the ICTY and the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, survivor and witness testimonies, admissions by members of Serbian paramilitary units, and the continued discovery of mass graves — the majority of Višegrad’s Serb residents and local authorities continue to deny that murder, torture, and systematic rape were committed there.
As journalist Emma Graham-Harrison observed in The Guardian in 2018, they are “bent on not only forgetting the campaign of death that transformed their town from one with a Muslim majority to one heavily dominated by ethnic Serbs, but erasing any trace that any of it ever happened.”
After blocking repeated attempts by survivors to commemorate the victims and mark the sites of atrocities, the local authorities instead erected a monument dedicated to Russian volunteers who fought on the side of Bosnian Serb forces during the war. They also continue to commemorate the “Day of Russian Volunteers” each year on April 12, marking the deaths of three Russian fighters killed near Višegrad in 1993.
Rhetoric Laying Groundwork for Even Worse?
For these reasons, and because genocide denial is widely recognized as one of the strongest indicators of the risk of renewed mass violence, confronting such narratives remains essential. Survivors like me know from lived experience how dangerous such rhetoric can be, because we remember where it led the last time it became widespread: persecution, ethnic cleansing, and ultimately genocide. These narratives, therefore, cannot be dismissed as mere political rhetoric. They revive the very ideas that once prepared the ground for mass atrocities.
As American historian Deborah Lipstadt observed in her seminal book on Holocaust denial, one of the most damaging effects of such denial is that it “plants seeds of doubt.” Allowing falsehoods to go unchallenged gradually erodes the historical record and weakens society’s ability to recognize and prevent future atrocities. Challenging denial is therefore not only a matter of historical accuracy but also a matter of moral responsibility.
