Srebrenica revisited: 30 years on from the worst massacre of the Balkan wars

Newshour

BBC

News, Daily News

4.4 • 984 Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this day in 1995, at the height of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Serb army captured what was supposedly the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica. In the ensuing days, thousands of Bosnian Muslim women were raped. 8000 Muslim men and boys were murdered. It was Europe's worst massacre since the Second World War.

Also in the programme: a Liberian historian on whether his fellow citizens should be outraged by President Trump's remarking on the Liberian leader's "excellent English"; and Scottish writer Irvine Welsh on his sequel to Trainspotting 30 years on from the publication of the original novel.

(Photo: Bosnian Muslim women react as they stand amid grave stones of victims killed during the Srebrenica genocide, at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in Potocari, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 11 July 2025. Credit: Reuters/Amel Emric)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to NewsHour, live from the BBC World Service in London.
0:07.8	I'm Rebecca Kesb.
0:09.4	And we begin the programme in the south-east European country of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
0:14.6	where today thousands drew together to mark a very solemn anniversary.
0:19.3	It's 30 years since the Srebrenica
0:21.4	the worst single atrocity on European soil since World War II.
0:26.6	It took place during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
0:30.7	After the old socialist state of Yugoslavia broke up,
0:34.3	populist leaders weaponised ethnic differences
0:37.1	and a complex civil war broke out
0:39.9	between three different groups, Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks, which are mostly Muslim Bosnians.
0:46.4	War crimes were carried out by all sides, and the traumatic echoes of those are still felt to this day.
0:52.9	But the Shrebanitsa massacre has been legally
0:56.2	recognised as a genocide. Around 8,000 people, mostly Bosniak boys and men, were first rounded
1:03.4	up by the Bosnian Serb forces.
1:06.4	I come up to see the dictator out of who we're saying.
1:12.6	I'm off. That captured in the archive there while they were then separated from their families and systematically murdered.
1:23.6	What's also shocking is that this happened in a designated safe area that UN forces were
1:29.7	supposed to be protecting. There's still around 1,000 people unaccounted for. Their bodies have not
1:35.5	yet been found. And today, the recently discovered partial remains of seven victims were laid
1:41.7	to rest alongside other victims.
1:47.7	Our Balkans correspondent Guy Delaney has been following events today, and as he reports, there are serious concerns that dangerous ethnic tensions remain in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
	...

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