Srebrenica

Srebrenica, town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, 35 km (22 mi) southwest of Zvornik. The town's name means, literally, “a silver mine.” There is also a spa with natural mineral waters containing iron and arsenic, with a constant water temperature of 12°C (54°F). Local monuments date Srebrenica back to at least the late 14th century. In the Middle Ages, Srebrenica was ruled by many different powers, until it became a part of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 16th century; it remained under Turkish control for almost 400 years.

Srebrenica was the site of a massacre that occurred during the civil war that erupted in 1992 between Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Croats, and Serbs (see Wars of Yugoslav Succession). The United Nations (UN) declared Srebrenica one of six “safe havens” under the protection of UN peacekeeping troops. However, Bosnian Serb troops overran Srebrenica in July 1995. They rounded up and massacred about 8,000 unarmed Bosniak men and boys from the area and then buried them in mass graves.

After the war ended with the signing of the Dayton peace accord in December 1995, dozens of mass graves were discovered. One of the largest, found near Zvornik in 2003, contained the remains of about 700 victims of the Srebrenica massacre. DNA tests have been conducted on exhumed remains as part of a UN-led effort to identify the victims. In July 2005 about 30,000 people gathered at a cemetery in Potočari, outside Srebrenica, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the massacre and properly bury the most recently identified victims. A total of about 2,000 victims had been identified.

The UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague, known as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), indicted the two alleged perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre for genocide. However, both men—wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and military commander Ratko Mladic—remained at large. The charge of genocide in connection with the carnage at Srebrenica was also a key part of charges against former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, whose trial at the ICTY began in 2002. In April 2004 the appeals chamber of the ICTY conclusively ruled that the Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide.

Population (1991) 37,211.