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Srebrenica massacre

July 11, Protected content that the world forgets !

This massacre was one of a series of massacres during the Bosnian war ( Protected content ). The total death toll in the war was more than 100,000, mostly Bosnian Muslim civilians. In addition 30, Protected content Bosnian women were raped as estimated by the UN. All crimes were done by Serb forces.

Srebrenica was declared as a "save haven" by the UN; The Bosnian volunteering fighters, who were protecting the town, were disarmed by the UN forces. After that UN peacekeeping unit of Protected content soldiers was assigned to protect the city.

The UN peacekeeping unit did nothing to prevent this massacre. Days after the massacre, the Dutch newspaper the Telegraaf featured a photograph of twelve cheerful soldiers in Novi Sad, enjoying a post-hostage meal provided by the Serb forces. (to see the photo, follow the below link)

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The massacre resulted in more than Protected content (death count is still increasing, mass graves have been found recently). In addition to tens or hundreds of rapes and torture cases.

All the world remembers Sep 11, but most of it forgets Jul 11, Protected content .

The following text was written By: Ian Traynor, The Guardian, Thursday 10 June Protected content BST

Guernica, Oradour, Katyn, Auschwitz are but a beginning in Europe's litany of 20th-century infamy. The list lengthened towards the century's end to include Srebrenica, a small hilltown by the river Drina on Bosnia's eastern border with Serbia.

On 13 July Protected content , in one of the last acts of the 42-month Bosnia war, General Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb force, which for two years had besieged the enclave of 40,000 Muslims, attacked.

It was an easy, bold and brutal conquest that shamed the international community. A few hundred Dutch peacekeepers were stationed in Srebrenica, which had gained the status of a UN-protected "safe area". Mladic bet correctly that the international community was too lily-livered to carry out its pledge to protect the enclave.

It is what happened next that earned Srebrenica its grim place in history. Fearful of a commander who had earned a reputation as a vengeful psychopath, the males of Srebrenica fled to the hills and the forests, trying to make it to the safety of Tuzla. Over 10 days, almost 8,000 of them were rounded up and shot in an operation that required extraordinary levels of planning and logistics. It was the worst single crime of the Yugoslav wars of the Protected content . It was the worst massacre in Europe since the Nazi era.

Years of forensic work and exhumations followed. Many of the victims are now buried at a special site at Potocari, the camp where the Dutch peacekeepers were based.

The UN's war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia and the international court of justice have both established as a juridical fact that the massacre was an act of genocide, the gravest crime there is – and the hardest to prove.

In a landmark Protected content , Theodor Meron, the American judge who presided over the tribunal in The Hague, said: "By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica ...They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity."

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