Paul Lowe/Panos Pictures, via Redux
More than 30 years ago, the Balkans were engulfed by Europe’s worst war since Hitler.
Resurgent nationalism tore apart a region long shared peacefully by Christians and Muslims.
The horror climaxed in the massacre at Srebrenica, where 8,000 Muslim boys and men were slaughtered.
The images of that time are painful to see, but an important reminder of what can happen when those with the power to intervene do not.
And of the price of looking away.
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Srebrenica, a Massacre Foretold, Still Casts Its Shadow
I first went to Bosnia in 1992 to cover Europe’s worst war since Hitler’s war. Like many others I came away scarred at the war’s end in 1995. The scars, in my own case, were not physical but they were deep, composed not only of the horror itself, but of living with the failures of Western states and the United Nations that led to the Srebrenica massacre.
Srebrenica was a disaster foretold. The slaughter by Serb soldiers of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, beginning on July 11, 1995, took place more than three years into the war. It unfolded in a United Nations “safe area” that proved to be anything but that, in a country patrolled to no discernible effect by NATO jets, and in a context of endless evasion by Western governments reluctant to intervene.
The slaughter at Srebrenica was proof, if any were needed, that good intentions alone do not save lives.