Far fewer people than usual attend commemoration events in Bosnia, due to coronavirus

Bosnia has marked the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, the only declared genocide in Europe since the second world war, with a small number of survivors in attendance, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The execution in July 1995 of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys is being commemorated in a series of events. There will also be a reburial of the recently identified remains of nine victims in a memorial cemetery outside the town in eastern Bosnia.

Even as remains continue to be identified, denialism is moving from far-right fringe into mainstream

At the genocide memorial centre outside Srebrenica, thousands of simple white gravestones stretch across the gently inclined hillside for as far as the eye can see.

Nearby, over a number of days in July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys. It was the worst crime of the Bosnian war, and remains the only massacre on European soil since the second world war to be ruled a genocide.

Families feel forgotten in what were meant to be temporary homes and many struggle for work

When Mujo Hrustanovic was transferred in 1997 to the Jezevac refugee camp in Bosnia, he thought he would stay for just a few months. That was what the government had told him. But more than two decades on, he is still there.

The 75-year-old shares a 30 sq metre apartment with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and their two children in one of the 50 white homes in in the camp built by international organisations near the city of Tuzla. Such apartments, intended as a temporary solution, have instead become a permanent home for hundreds of survivors of the genocide in Srebrenica, Europe’s worst atrocity since the second world war.