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Massacre in Srebrenica

Klaus Dahmann / bkApril 23, 2013

At the height of the Bosnian War, Serbian troops enter the Muslim-dominated town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Serbian General Ratko Mladić orders 8,000 men and boys to be shot.

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Muslim refugess from the town of Srebrenica as they flee.Image: EPA/AFP/Getty Images

Air support requested by Dutch UN peacekeepers fails to arrive and the peacekeepers are unable to stop the massacre. The 400 some UN soldiers can do nothing more than watch as the corpses of male residents from Srebrenica and surrounding towns are dumped into mass graves. The International Criminal Court in The Hague rules that the mass murder constitutes genocide and establishes a special tribunal to prosecute the crimes.

The massacre in Srebrenica is described by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia sentences several of the perpetrators to years in prison. Mladić himself has been held in custody since 2011 while awaiting trial.