It has been 30 years since more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, in the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.
The massacre occurred as Bosnian Muslims attempted to flee the town, which was captured by Bosnian Serb forces in the closing months of the country’s 1992-95 inter-ethnic war. Most of the victims were hunted down and summarily executed as they tried to flee through forests. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves and later reburied to hide evidence of atrocities.
The International Court of Justice and the UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague have ruled that the killings were genocide.
Reporters on the ground in Bosnia were not able to reach Srebrenica itself, which had been under siege by Bosnian Serb forces for three years.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour recalled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum how when she arrived in the region in 1993, two years before the massacre, she found a beseiged town she could not enter.
“So we waited outside, and they brought out truckloads of wounded,” she said.
CBS news correspondent Barry Peterson only learned that genocide had occurred when he heard the stories of refugees in camps days after the massacre.
The Independent had several journalists covering the atrocities at the time, based in Bosnia, Serbia and London. Below, we look at how it was covered in this newspaper.
On this day 30 years ago, The Independent’s then defence correspondent Christopher Bellamy covered the advancement of Bosnian Serb forces into the town of Srebrenica.
Two days earlier, Bosnian Serb forces began the takeover of Srebrenica under the order of Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Serb Democratic Party. He was found guilty of committing war crimes, including genocide, during the war in Bosnia.
Over the course of three days, Bosnian Serb forces intensified shelling of the enclave, which had been under the protection of around 600 lightly armed Dutch infantry troops. It fell on July 11, with Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic – who was also convicted for war crimes and genocide in 2017 – entering the town with Serb camera crews that afternoon.
On July 13, news of the horror that was to be inflicted on Bosnian Muslims was beginning to filter through. The Independent’s front page carried the headline: ‘Torment of Bosnia’s fleeing civilians’.
The story, written by then Europe editor Tony Barber, describes how all male Muslims over 16 were to be screened by Serb forces for ‘possible war crimes’ in the nearby town of Bratunac.
Two days later, the Independent’s Saturday edition ran a dispatch from Reuters reporter Zoran Radosavljevic with the headline: “Muslims’ flight brings no escape from despair”.
