Thursday, December 9th, 2021
Victim of the 1995 genocide
New mass grave found in Srebrenica
In 1995, more than 8,000 Muslims were executed in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb armed forces. In order to cover up the crime, the victims are buried in new places. Over 90 mass graves have emerged. Well, 26 years after the massacre, another one.
Further victims of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 were found in a newly discovered mass grave in the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the grave was found near the town of Kalinovik, 200 kilometers from Sebrenica. Thus the grave is so far the most distant mass grave discovered “by far” from Srebrenica.
DNA samples from the site were compared with genetic samples provided by relatives of the victims. The researchers found matches in a total of ten cases. The samples were forwarded to a specialized agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina for official identification.
International courts described the 1995 execution of more than 8,000 Muslim men by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica as “genocide”. The Bosnian-Serb war leader Radovan Karadzic and his army chief Ratko Mladic were both sentenced to life imprisonment by a UN war crimes tribunal, particularly for the massacre in Srebrenica.
According to ICMP’s head of the Western Balkans program, Matthew Holliday, the new grave is just a few kilometers from a village where paramilitaries from the “Scorpio” unit executed six prisoners from Srebrenica in mid-July 1995. Footage of this execution was shown as evidence at international trials.
According to the Srebrenica Memorial Center, more than 90 mass graves of victims of the massacre have already been found. The researchers believe that many of the bodies were later dug up from their original mass graves and buried in new locations to cover up the crime. The whereabouts of hundreds of victims is still unclear, but new discoveries of graves are becoming increasingly rare. According to Holliday, the last discovery was made in 2016.