Abstract:
On July 11, 2025, the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide was commemorated across Europe and at the memorial cemetery in Potocari, where seven newly identified victims were buried beside more than six thousand already interred. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, whose Dutch compatriots failed to protect the United Nations safe zone in 1995, delivered a video tribute. This article does not question the sincerity of that remembrance. It examines what the remembrance is structured to exclude. The documentary record, including the war diary of the convicted general Ratko Mladic, the official Srebrenica report of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, and the 2016 Israeli Supreme Court case that sealed the files, establishes that Israeli arms dealers, operating with the knowledge of their state, supplied weapons and training to Serb forces during the genocide, breaching a United Nations embargo, while the state condemned the killing in public. Thirty years later, arms exports between Serbia and Israel surged and the political heirs of the Bosnian Serb war leadership deepened their ties with Tel Aviv. Srebrenica is commemorated as a sealed historical event precisely so that the pattern it belongs to can continue without the commemoration ever being applied to it.
Main Article:
There are two ways a society can remember an atrocity. It can remember it as a closed chapter, an aberration safely located in the past, honored with ceremonies that affirm how far the world has come. Or it can remember it as an open pattern, a thing that recurs because the conditions that produced it were never dismantled. The difference between these two forms of memory is not sentimental. It is the difference between remembrance that prevents and remembrance that permits.
On July 11, 2025, the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide was commemorated in the first manner, comprehensively and sincerely, across the institutions of the West.
The facts being commemorated are not in dispute. Between July 11 and the days that followed in 1995, forces of the Army of Republika Srpska under General Ratko Mladic overran the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a designated United Nations safe area under the protection of Dutch peacekeepers. They separated Bosniak Muslim men and boys from their families and systematically executed more than eight thousand of them, the youngest still children, burying them in mass graves that were later dug up with bulldozers and scattered across other sites to conceal the evidence. [1] The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights records the figure at 8,327. Over twenty-five thousand women, children, and elderly were forcibly expelled. [2] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice both ruled the massacre a genocide, targeting Bosnian Muslims solely on the basis of their identity, with the intent to destroy them as a group. Mladic and the wartime Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadzic are serving life sentences. Courts have sentenced fifty-four people to a combined seven hundred and eighty-one years and five life terms. [3]
The commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary was extensive. At Potocari, seven newly identified victims, including two nineteen-year-old men, were buried beside more than six thousand already resting there, in the annual funeral held for those still being unearthed from the mass graves three decades later. [1] NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, whose Dutch compatriots had been tasked with protecting the safe area and failed, addressed the gathering through a pre-recorded video, recalling that he had visited the memorial as Dutch prime minister and met mothers of sons who would never grow old. [4] The European Council president and European commissioners attended. The European External Action Service, under High Representative Kaja Kallas, had mounted a photo exhibition titled fragments of the Srebrenica genocide at its Brussels headquarters. Heads of state across Europe issued statements of sorrow. [4]
None of this remembrance is false, and none of it is the subject of this article. The subject is what the ceremony is built to leave out.
At the same commemoration, Munira Subasic, who leads the Mothers of Srebrenica association and who lost her husband, her youngest son, and more than twenty relatives in the genocide, delivered a warning that the assembled dignitaries did not repeat in their own remarks. As I stand here, she said, many mothers in Ukraine and Palestine are going through what we went through in 1995. It is the twenty-first century, but instead of justice, fascism has woken up. [1] A mother who buried her own child in that cemetery stood before the institutions of Europe and told them the genocide they had gathered to close was not closed. She was describing the pattern. The dignitaries were commemorating the chapter.
The distance between those two things is where the documentary record becomes essential, because the record establishes that one of the states most fluent in the language of genocide remembrance was, during the genocide itself, materially assisting its perpetrators.
The evidence regarding Israeli assistance to Serb forces during the Bosnian war is not rumor, and it does not rest on a single source. It rests on several that converge.
The convicted general Ratko Mladic recorded it in his own war diary, entered into evidence and cited in the judgment of the Israeli Supreme Court. From Israel, Mladic wrote, they offer joint combat against extreme Islam, offer the training of our men in Greece at their expense, they offer us special weapons for five hundred men, snipers for free. [5] Dr. Cees Wiebes, in the appendix on intelligence and the war in Bosnia prepared for the official Srebrenica report of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, documented an arms relationship, writing that Belgrade traditionally considered Israel, Russia, and Greece its best friends, and that the state of Israel had in fact always taken a strongly pro-Serb position. [5] Dobrila Gajic-Glisic, a former official of the Serbian Ministry of Defense, wrote in her book on the Serbian army that one of the largest arms deals was concluded in Israel in October 1991, and that for understandable reasons the details of the deal were not made public at the time. [6] A humanitarian volunteer testified that in 1994 a United Nations officer asked him to examine the remains of a 120mm shell bearing Hebrew lettering that had exploded on the Sarajevo airfield, and that he had seen Serb forces carrying Israeli-made Uzi weapons. [7]
In 2016, the Israeli academics Yair Auron and Eitay Mack petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to release the state records of these defense exports to the former Yugoslavia during the period of the United Nations arms embargo. The court rejected the petition and sealed the material. [7] A state does not classify what does not exist. The sealing of the record is not the absence of evidence. It is an acknowledgment by the state itself that the record contains something it will not permit to be seen. Throughout the period of these transfers, the Israeli government publicly condemned the massacre while, in the documented assessment of the petitioners, supplying weapons to its perpetrators and training their troops. [7]
This is the history that the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary was structured not to touch. And it is not merely history.
Two weeks before the writing of this analysis, Middle East Eye reported that Zeljka Cvijanovic, the Serb member of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia, met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on June 22, 2026. [8] The report documented that political and diplomatic ties between Republika Srpska, the Serb entity created by the war in which the genocide was committed, and Israel date back more than fifteen years, and that arms and ammunition exports between Serbia and Israel had surged since October 2023, jumping by 140 percent to 131 million dollars, according to Haaretz, even after the Serbian president had publicly declared he would halt weapons exports. [8] The entity born of the genocide and the state whose dealers armed the genocide are, thirty years later, trading weapons and exchanging state visits, while the international community commemorates the genocide as though it belonged entirely to the past.
The pattern that Munira Subasic named from the podium is the actual subject. Srebrenica was not an isolated eruption of Balkan hatred. It was an instance of a recurring structure: a population marked for destruction on the basis of identity, a set of international guarantees that proved worthless at the decisive moment, a set of powerful states that condemned the killing in public while enabling it in practice, and a subsequent commemoration that honored the dead in a manner carefully severed from the mechanism that killed them. The Dutch peacekeepers who did not fire are remembered with sorrow. The arms dealers who did supply are remembered not at all, their records sealed by a court.
The Mothers of Srebrenica understood the assignment better than the institutions that came to mourn with them. They did not ask Europe to feel sorrow. Subasic asked Europe and the world to help fight against hatred, against injustice, and against killings, in the present tense, naming Palestine and Ukraine in the same breath as her own dead. She was asking that the memory of Srebrenica be made into the second kind of memory, the kind that prevents, by being applied to the killing happening now rather than sealed around the killing that happened then. [1]
The response of the commemorating institutions was to honor the past and say nothing of the present. That silence is not a failure of the commemoration. It is its function. A genocide remembered as a closed chapter imposes no obligation on the conduct of the states remembering it. A genocide remembered as an open pattern would require those states to examine their arms exports, their alliances, their vetoes, and their current partners, and to ask whether the thing they gather each July to mourn is being enabled again by their own hands. The commemoration is designed to prevent exactly that question.
Thirty years after Srebrenica, the bodies are still being pulled from the ground in fragments, so scattered across separate graves that mothers bury partial remains. The men who ordered the killing are in prison. The dealers who armed it are protected by a sealed court file. The entity the killing created is signing arms deals with the state that supplied it. And in Gaza, in Sudan, and elsewhere, populations are being destroyed on the basis of their identity while the same international community that gathers at Potocari issues the same condemnations it issued in 1995, with the same practical effect. We honor the Bosnian dead most truthfully not by sealing their genocide in the past, but by recognizing the pattern they died inside, and refusing to let it keep moving under the cover of our remembrance.
References:
1. PBS NewsHour. "Thousands Gather in Srebrenica on 30th Anniversary of Europe's Only Acknowledged Genocide Since WWII." July 11, 2025. Citing the Potocari funeral and the remarks of Munira Subasic.
2. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. "High Commissioner Commemorates the 30th Anniversary of the Genocide in Srebrenica." July 11, 2025. Citing the figure of 8,327 and the forcible transfer of over 25,000.
3. Euronews. "Thousands Gather to Mark the 30th Anniversary of Genocide in Srebrenica." July 11, 2025. Citing ICTY and Court of Bosnia sentencing totals.
4. Euronews, July 11, 2025, citing the Rutte video address and EU attendance. Also European External Action Service, "Srebrenica Genocide Commemoration at EEAS," 2025.
5. Balkan Insight. "Israel Court Rejects Request for Bosnia War Deals Data." December 8, 2016. Citing the Mladic diary as quoted in the judgment and the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation report by Cees Wiebes.
6. Mondoweiss. "We Betrayed the Legacy of the Holocaust: Professor Yair Auron Pushes Israel to Confront Complicity with Bosnian Genocide." December 13, 2016. Citing Dobrila Gajic-Glisic, The Serbian Army.
7. Middle East Monitor. "Concealing Israel's Arms Exports to Perpetrators of Genocide Is a Moral Obligation." July 3, 2017. Also +972 Magazine, "Supreme Court Rules Against Exposing Israel's Role in Bosnian Genocide," December 2016, citing the Auron and Mack petition, the Hebrew-lettered shell, and the sealed records.
8. Middle East Eye. "Israel Finds New Breakaway Allies in Bosnia's Serbs." June 2026. Citing the Netanyahu-Cvijanovic meeting of June 22, 2026, and Haaretz on the 140 percent export surge to 131 million dollars.