A woman lays flowers among names of killed citizens in the Bosnian city of Prijedor, on May 31, 2013, to commemorate “White Banner Day.” Photograph by Radivoje Pavicic / AP

One of the largest massacres in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century took place in the small city of Prijedor, in northern Bosnia. In April, 1992, as the Bosnian war was beginning, the Bosnian Serb regime announced on the radio that it was taking over the town and the surrounding areas. On May 31st, Serb nationalists ordered all non-Serbs to mark their houses with white flags or sheets, and to wear a white armband if they left their homes. Over the next few months, they initiated mass expulsions of an estimated fifty thousand Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnian Croats. An estimated twenty-five thousand people, including some women, children, and elderly people, were taken to concentration camps outside the town, where, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.), many were tortured or raped, and more than three thousand were killed. Massacres like this one were occurring across Bosnia, but, until Srebrenica, in 1995, none was larger than Prijedor.

Former residents began to come back to Prijedor in 1998, three years after the end of the war, but by 2007 less than a third had returned. In May, 2012, Emir Hodžić, a Bosniak who was expelled when he was fourteen, came back to his hometown for the first time. It was the twentieth anniversary of the crimes committed there, and he wanted to pay homage to those who had been tortured and killed. In 1992, his father and older brother were taken to the Omarska concentration camp, on the site of a mining complex outside Prijedor. They were held there for three months and tortured, and then transferred to another detention center. They were only released after the camps were discovered by a group of British and American journalists, who broadcast the images around the world. The camps were shut down, in November, 1992, but instead of remaining at home, Hodžić and his family were put on a convoy by the Bosnian Serbs and transported to the Croatian border, where they were handed off to the United Nations. They eventually settled in New Zealand.

When Hodžić returned to his hometown, in 2012, he put a strip of white cloth around his left arm and tried to enter Omarska, which is once again an active mine. Security guards stopped him at the entrance and threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave. Full of disbelief, he went back into Prijedor. “I was so, so angry,” Hodžić told me. Local organizations had planned a memorial ceremony, in which they had intended to lay out two hundred and sixty-six body bags, for the number of women and children who were killed in Prijedor, but the local government banned the event. Hodžić decided to see it through alone. He bought more white fabric that he laid out like a body bag and stood in the square by himself, for twenty minutes, in silence, hoping someone would approach and ask him what he was doing. Nobody came. “It was a very weird feeling, an overwhelming feeling of dehumanization, the same one I remembered from 1992. I was once again marked as ‘the other’ in the city where I was born,” Hodžić said. “Victims in Prijedor aren’t seen, and I wanted to show them, ‘You can’t erase me.’ ”

Hodžić had asked someone to take a picture of him, and he posted it on Facebook, on a page he had set up with a group of friends called Stop Genocide Denial. They had planned to start a campaign to make May 31st International White Armband Day, to honor all people who were killed because they were different, and the photo of Hodžić standing alone in the middle of the empty square went viral, rallying people to the cause.

Among Hodžić’s friends was Edin Ramulić, who was imprisoned when he was twenty-two, and whose father and brother were tortured and killed. Since 1999, Ramulić, who came back to Prijedor with the first returnees, has been involved in survivors’ groups and has tried to talk about what happened, but with little success. “It is like a story that belongs only to us, victims and survivors,” Ramulić said. “And, as long as we do not try to involve anybody else in that story, it’s O.K. But when we approach other people in Prijedor and try to engage them, it becomes a problem.” Ramulić came out to the square with six others, some of whom were Serbs, on May 31, 2012. They all wore white armbands and stood together in silence.

Thirty-seven people have been convicted and sentenced for crimes committed in Prijedor in the nineteen-nineties; the I.C.T.Y. sentenced twelve of them, while the others were tried domestically, in a war-crimes court in Sarajevo. The Sarajevo court has so far issued five hundred indictments, but the Bosnian public knows little about them. Even the ongoing trial in The Hague of Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military chief, has not been broadcast on TV or radio channels. Part of the problem is that, in both courts, “the process is about international lawyers and political élites,” Eric Gordy, a sociologist at University College London, whose work focusses on the former Yugoslavia, told me. “The tribunal and local courts never developed a clear idea of who their clientele was, never took enough of an interest in articulating or addressing the concerns of victims, or explaining to the local public what was being established and what it meant.”

(The Bosnian war-crimes court said in a statement that claims about a lack of outreach probably come from people “who do not know much about work of this institution. We consider transparency and public relations to be very important.” The court noted that most hearings are open to the public, and that it is involved in a series of public discussions, in coöperation with local organizations. It also argued that public interest in war-crimes proceedings is decreasing in Bosnia. “It is not possible to expect that twenty years after the war, people will have the same interest in war-crimes trials as they had ten or fifteen years ago,” the statement said. “It is natural, therefore, for media coverage to decrease as well.”)

A further challenge is posed by the Bosnian government, which has little interest in moving beyond the war’s divisions. The Dayton Agreement, which brought the war to a halt, in 1995, also instituted a governance structure that recognizes all of the warring ethnic groups as active parties. Dayton, which many say effectively froze the conflict in place, created a vast and complicated system: two “administrative entities” (Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), three Presidents, and ten cantons, each with its own President, ministries, and parliament. There are more than a hundred and fifty government ministers at the various levels, in a country of less than four million people, and countless Bosnians are employed in the state apparatus. Dayton also made Bosnia what is often called a “semi-protectorate,” a country where the international community has ultimate authority over local governance structures. But the international community has redirected its energy into other conflicts, leaving Bosnia to its corrupt local élites. According to Transparency International, Bosnia today is one of the most corrupt countries in the region. It is also one of the poorest, with more than sixty per cent youth unemployment. Because of economic hardships, people of all ethnicities are leaving. Prijedor and its surrounding villages are once again becoming empty.

On August 5, 2012, several dozen people wearing white armbands gathered again at the main square in Prijedor. Among them was Fikret Bačić, whose twelve-year-old son and six-year-old daughter were killed, in 1992. Bačić wanted a memorial to be created for the hundred and two children who were killed in Prijedor, and this effort became a focus of future demonstrations. That day, people carried schoolbags, each one bearing the name of a child who was killed. Local authorities had forbidden the gathering, claiming that it could incite ethnic conflict, and that using the word “genocide” would give the town a bad name. The people who came ignored the government. I was among them, walking in a column that moved slowly down the main street, where cafés normally play loud music. On this day, the cafés were silent, and the patrons watched quietly, though they didn’t join us. When we reached the square, we set the schoolbags down in a pattern that spelled out the word “genocide,” to protest the government’s opposition. Some of the activists were local Serbs who were in the process of forming an organization called Kvart Youth Centre, which promotes dialogue in Prijedor about the war. After the gathering, local police brought several of the participants to the station for questioning, but soon let them go.