srebrenica genocide 20 years ago

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Saturday will mark the passage of 20 years since the mass killing of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War.  

On July 11, 1995, towards the end of the war, Bosnian Serb soldiers swept into a U.N.-designated “safe haven,”  taking military-age men, boys, and some elderly men out to be executed in the days that followed, and dumping their bodies into pits in the surrounding forests. The process of finding the bodies of the missing men took years, and the task of identifying and burying them properly continues to this day—more than 1,000 are still listed as missing.

International tribunals have convicted a number of people of genocide related to the Srebrenica killings, and several trials and appeals are ongoing. On Wednesday, Russia vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have condemned the massacre as a “crime of genocide,” claiming the resolution singled out Serbs unfairly, and “would lead to greater tension in the region.”

Mejra Djogaz, 66, poses with photos of her three sons and husband in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, on July 4, 2015.

On July 12, 1995, some of the 30,000 Muslim women and children refugees from the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica wait for transportation, in the village of Potocari.

A Bosnian Serb tank crew rests after entering the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia on July 12, 1995.

An unnamed woman and her mother, refugees from Srebrenica, cry together because they don't know what happened to the rest of their family, on July 13, 1995.

Dutch UN peacekeepers sit on top of an APC while Muslim refugees from Srebrenica gather in the village of Potocari, on July 13, 1995.

A Bosnian Serb soldier fires a heavy machine-gun as his comrade holds the cartridge belt during a “mopping-up” operation near eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica on July 13, 1995.

A Bosnian Muslim woman pleads for international help in tracing thousands of men missing from the town of Srebrenica, taken by Bosnian Serb forces the previous July, during a demonstration in Tuzla on February 1, 1996.

A Finnish forensic expert looks at the remains of one of more than 100 Muslims killed on a hill, deep in Bosnian Serb Territory on July 2, 1996.

International War Crimes Tribunal investigators clear away soil and debris from dozens of Srebrenica victims buried in a mass grave near the village of Pilica, 55 km (32 mi) northeast of Tuzla, on September 18, 1996.

A Finnish forensic expert places a number next to the skull of a Srebrenica victim found in the hills above the village of Kravice, 15 km (10 mi) northwest of Srebrenica, on July 5, 1996.

Stacks of unidentified corpses line the walls of an underground shelter at a Bosnian morgue in Tuzla on March 28, 1997.

Aida Civic, a Bosnian Muslim refugee woman from Srebrenica, screams as she enters a container with remains of around 3,500 killed Bosnian Muslims, most of them from the former U.N. safe zone of Srebrenica.

(1 of 2) Forensic experts of the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) search for human remains in a mass grave in the village of Kamenica on November 4, 2008.

(2 of 2) The same field in the village of Kamenica, rephotographed on June 24, 2015.

Approximately 17 people were killed at this site in 1995, according to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Hajra Catic poses under pictures of victims of the genocide in Tuzla on June 11, 2015.

Srebrenica massacre survivor Nedzad Avdic, 37, touches the engraved names of those killed in a massacre and buried at the Memorial Center in the Srebrenica suburb of Potocari on June 27, 2015.

An aerial view of the memorial center in Potocari near Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on June 20, 2015.

Ema Hasanovic, 5, a young Bosnian Muslim girl, pays her respects near to the coffin of her uncle, in the Memorial center in Potocari, on July 9, 2014.

A grave digger wipes his sweat while preparing graves at a memorial center for victims of the Srebrenica massacre in Potocari on July 5, 2015.

A Bosnian Muslim man searches for the grave of his relative in Srebrenica on July 11, 2014.

A woman cries at the grave of her husband who was a victim of the massacre.

In this photo taken on Saturday, July 4, 2015, Hanifa Djogaz, 66, holds a tobacco tin at the doorstep of her house in Srebrenica. Her son Sabahudin gave his mother the tobacco tin. "Keep this for me, so I can put my cigarettes into something when we get there," he told her. She never saw him again.

Senior Forensic Anthropologist Dragana Vucetic of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) walks through the ICMP center near Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on June 11, 2015.

Forensic Anthropologist Dragana Vucetic attempts to identify the remains of a victim of the Srebrenica massacre, near Tuzla, on June 11, 2015.

Participants in the "March of Peace" hike through mountainous countryside of Nezuk, 150 km northeast of Sarajevo, Bosnia, on July 8, 2015.