On the third and ultimate day, Dizdarevic and most of these round him couldn’t include their feelings as they reached Potocari, the location of the memorial to Srebrenica victims.
Within the grassy valley dotted with row upon row of white marble tombstones, are the remnants of the grey slab concrete buildings the place the UN Dutch battalion had been stationed to guard Bosniaks in the course of the conflict.
However in July 1995, the battalion was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces, resulting in the bloodshed that ensued.
Reaching the location the place hundreds had been brutally killed introduced “overwhelming unhappiness” to Dizdarevic.
“It was very emotional,” he stated.
However Dizdarevic was additionally awash with aid – not solely from the bodily toll of the march being over, but in addition from the emotional weight of getting walked within the footsteps of victims who by no means made it to security.
“It was essential for each considered one of us to complete this march,” he stated.
“This remembrance ought to result in a prevention of potential future genocide.”
As he and his companions arrange one ultimate camp in Potocari, earlier than the memorial occasion there the subsequent day on the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica bloodbath, Dizdarevic contemplated what justice for its victims seems to be like.
“The seek for justice … is a really troublesome course of … Much more troublesome is that the Serbian society … [is] very in favour of this genocide,” he stated.
“I’m afraid that Serbian society – they didn’t endure this catharsis [of] saying, ‘Sure, we did this and we’re responsible, sorry.’ [On the] opposite, they’re very happy with it … or they deny it.”
Within the years since, the Worldwide Court docket of Justice and courts within the Balkans have sentenced virtually 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officers collectively to greater than 700 years in jail for the genocide.
However lots of the accused stay unpunished, and genocide denial is rampant, particularly amongst political leaders in Serbia and the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska.
Milorad Dodik, the entity’s present chief, whose picture seems on billboards flashing the three-finger salute, an emblem of Serb nationalism, has dismissed the Srebrenica genocide as a “fabricated delusion”.
Nonetheless, Dizdarevic has held on to hope, a sense renewed in the course of the march as he watched numerous younger folks participate, lots of them born after the Bosnian conflict.
“What’s, for me, essential, [is] that the younger women and men who take part on this march perceive … they need to play an energetic function within the prevention of future genocide by making a constructive setting of their societies,” he stated.
On July 11, the day after the march ended, Dizdarevic and his group joined hundreds in Potocari to mark the sombre anniversary, the place the stays of seven newly recognized victims had been laid to relaxation.
There, they stood in solemn silence because the coffins had been lowered into freshly dug graves, quickly to be marked with new marble headstones, becoming a member of the greater than 6,000 others already laid to relaxation.
Reporting for this text was made potential by the NGO Islamic Aid.
