Dutchbat soldiers watched the first tanks roll past their observation post. The Bosnian Serb Army, commanded by General Ratko Mladić, entered the town of Srebrenica in the afternoon of July 11. Women and children gathered outside the UN compound at Potočari, its perimeter fence lined with white plastic sheeting. Men and teenage boys hid in the woods or attempted to flee through the hills. Mladić, filmed by his own cameraman, handed candy to children and promised no one would be harmed. He described the occasion as a gift to the Serbian people and a time for revenge after the Ottoman conquests.
The attack violated United Nations Security Council Resolution 819, which had designated Srebrenica a ‘safe area’ in 1993. Approximately 400 Dutch peacekeepers, outgunned and without close air support, could not defend the enclave. Over the following week, Serb forces separated males from the refugee columns. They executed thousands in fields and warehouses, burying the dead in mass graves later excavated and relocated to conceal the crime.
The massacre was the single largest atrocity in Europe since the Second World War. It demonstrated the catastrophic failure of the UN’s safe area policy and the concept of humanitarian intervention without the will to use force. The international community’s paralysis provided the time and space for the killings to be carried out with bureaucratic efficiency.
In 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled the events at Srebrenica constituted genocide. The verdict established a legal precedent for mass murder in a limited geographical area during a wider conflict. The date now marks an annual day of mourning, and the recovered remains of victims, identified through DNA, are still being reburied.