: Seven Years Later, Srebrenica Remembers a Massacre

The scars are still visible everywhere in Srebrenica, with burnt out mosques and buildings marking the siege in 1995 that claimed the lives of 10,000 Muslims at the hands of Serbian general Ratko Mladic. Nevertheless, thousands of Muslims returned to the Bosnian city this week to commemorate the massacre with a memorial led by Bosnia’s chief Islamic cleric. To commemorate the occasion, a new mosque was opened to replace the scores of burned ones (contrasting with the majority of churches which remained unscathed). In the years that passed, the legal process has turned into a quagmire that led to the collapse of the Dutch government in April and a troubled truth and reconciliation process in Belgrade. And to illustrate that the war isn’t completely over, a fugitive war criminal was caught the same week, along with a raid on the home Radovan Karadic (he is still at large). The good news? The US finally reached a compromise (postponement, rather) on a renewed UN mandate for US peacekeepers (the US still wants immunity from prosecution in the International Criminal Court). But for now, Muslims deal with their disrupted lives. “I don’t feel secure here any more,” says one returnee. “Before the war we used to say we could lie down and sleep anywhere, in a forest or on a park bench, although we were not free to speak out. Now we can speak out, but it is no longer safe to lie down and sleep anywhere we want.”

Shahed Amanullah is editor-in-chief of altmuslim.com.