Two decades after the darkest moment in Europe’s recent past, consensus about what happened, and what it means, is fraying

MUHAMED DURAKOVIC wandered the hills and forests for 37 days after Srebrenica, his home town, fell to Bosnian Serb forces on July 11th 1995. He survived, but 8,000 men and boys did not. The victims were, like him, Bosnians of Muslim heritage, also known as Bosniaks.

The murder of Srebenica’s menfolk, rounded up as they tried to reach friendly territory, was the worst single crime committed in Europe since 1945. According to Mr Durakovic, who runs a summer school where students learn what happened, “some places are meant to be symbols, and Srebrenica is the Bosniak Auschwitz.”

Exactly 20 years later, the name of Srebrenica has emerged as a talisman of evil, but it has also become an object of bitter contention, both in the region and globally. At the UN Security Council, a British-sponsored resolution denouncing the Srebrenica genocide and its denial was vetoed by Russia, which said the text was one-sided and lacked the consent of local parties. The last statement is, sadly, true; and it reflects a new flare-up of acrimony.

This marks a troubling reversal. For a decade after American-led military action and diplomacy brought an end to Bosnia’s war in 1995, there was broad if grudging agreement about what occurred in Srebrenica, at least internationally, and what it implied for the country’s future.

It was accepted that, as the Dayton peace accord laid down, Bosnia’s feuding communities should work together to build a new state where refugees could return and the worst crimes would be exposed and punished. But at least since 2006, when constitutional reforms were blocked, the country has moved backward. In Mr Durakovic’s view, hatred between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks is still alive, and the Bosnian state has atrophied.

That may be a little too gloomy. Hate is hard to measure, but one remarkable thing about post-war Bosnia has been the lack of revenge killings. In everyday life, individual Bosnians get on well, even in Srebrenica whose population has never recovered from the massacre. But people are jaded with the Dayton deal, which remade Bosnia as a loosely articulated state with a Serb-run north and east and a Bosniak and Croat entity forming the rest.

At the time, Dayton was hailed a great breakthrough. Now many people, albeit mostly Bosniaks who want a unitary state, say they are trapped by the accord’s rigid structures. Those structures seem to suit the petty purposes of local politicians who claim to be advancing Serb, Croat or Bosniak interests, and historical perspectives, at the expense of rival groups.

It is both a symptom and a cause of Bosnia’s fractured state that progress towards complete agreement on the meaning of Srebrenica has broken down. In 2004 a report by the government of the Republika Srpska, the Serb half of Bosnia, acknowledged that mass murder took place. Then the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague ruled that what happened at Srebrenica was genocide, the sole act in the Yugoslav wars that clearly deserved that grim title. The International Court of Justice, which adjudicates interstate disputes, agreed.

But despite the detailed testimony of more than 1,000 witnesses at the Hague tribunal, and confessions from some perpetrators, the matter has not been settled in everybody’s eyes. Bosniaks have made Srebrenica a central part of their collective identity. But among Bosnian Serbs and their kin in Serbia itself, it is respectable to deny or play down what happened. Serb leaders reject the word genocide.

Different tribes, different histories

Worryingly, children from Bosnia’s rival communities learn different histories. Every Bosniak child hears about the genocide, but many Bosnian-Serb children are taught to see the mastermind of the killings, Ratko Mladic, as a hero, although he is on trial for egregious crimes in The Hague. Bosnian Croat children are not told much because the crime did not affect Croats.

Even among Bosniaks, Srebrenica can be divisive. People from other towns where atrocities took place grumble that they are forgotten. The Mothers of Srebrenica, a group of women whose menfolk were killed, are respected but intensely politicised; they support Bakir Izetbegovic, a member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency.

Signs of a much worse intra-Muslim split emerged recently. A slick video issued in the name of the Islamic State terror group, released last month, calls on Balkan Muslims to murder their non-Muslim neighbours. It says Bosnia’s “secular and nationalist” leaders were complicit in the 1995 genocide and should be overthrown.

Historical arguments have been especially fierce in the run-up to the 20th anniversary which will draw many celebrities to Srebrenica. Many Serbs admit that a terrible deed was done there but say Serb victims of fighting near the enclave should be remembered, too. The Serb narrative stresses that the town’s Bosnian garrison used UN cover to raid nearby Serb villages; given that the town was a UN-protected “safe area”, it should have been disarmed. But in the view of independent observers, the great majority of Serb casualties were military, and the Serbs suffered nothing remotely comparable to the summary killings ordered on a vast scale by Mr Mladic. A symptom of Serbia’s pugnacious mood is its determination to prosecute Naser Oric, who commanded Bosnia’s forces in Srebrenica but was mysteriously withdrawn from the enclave in spring 1995. Mr Oric was given two years’ jail by The Hague tribunal in 2006 because of the death and mistreatment of Serb prisoners; this conviction was overturned on appeal in 2008. Last month he was arrested in Switzerland under a Serbian warrant, prompting fury among Bosniaks; he was then returned to Bosnia rather than Serbia. Milorad Dodik, the president of the Republika Srpska, was willing a few years ago to acknowledge Srebrenica as a crime; he now says talk of genocide is a “lie”. However strange it may seem to outsiders, some Serbs see Srebrenica as a symbol of their own unjust treatment, not that of the thousands of Bosniak victims.

More happily, there are some liberal-minded Serbs who accept the horror of the things done in their name. In one act of contrition, a group of women began bicycling from Belgrade to Srebrenica to honour the Bosniak victims; in a similar spirit, plans were made for thousands of people to lie down in front of the Serbian parliament to mourn them.

But across the Balkans as a whole, there have been troubling signs recently of politicians delving even further into history to make political capital. In May, for example, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, the president of Croatia, laid a wreath in Austria to Croats who had served the pro-Nazi Ustasha regime. Critics called this an insult to the memory of people, including Jews and Serbs, who were killed by the Ustasha. Meanwhile a Belgrade court sparked a furore by rehabilitating Draza Mihailovic, the wartime royalist leader who was executed in 1946. He is a hero to right-wingers but recalled with dismay by people who fought with the communist partisans. If the events of 70 years ago are still putting people at loggerheads, that is surely one more compelling reason why a ghastly episode of two decades ago should be contemplated in a spirit of sober remembrance, not point-scoring.