FIGHT AGAINST DENIAL – HATE INVOCATION
The United Kingdom marked the 27th anniversary of Srebrenica Remembrance Day on 13 July at a memorial reception at Her Majesty’s Government hosted by Graham Stuart MP, Minister of State United Kingdom at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and organised by the charity Remembering Srebrenica at the Locarno headquarters of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
The reception was attended by MPs and ambassadors representing countries around the world on the occasion of the commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide. The Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina , Šefik Džaferović, spoke at the reception alongside genocide survivor and director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center , Dr. Emir Suljagić.
Other prominent speakers from across the political spectrum included the Rt Hon Greg Clark MP, Secretary of State at the Department for Housing and Communities, Fabian Hamilton , Minister for Peace and Disarmament, and Alicia Kearns, MP, Chair of the Parliamentary Group for Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as performances by Bosnian opera singers Dženana Šehanović Sarajli ć and Dženana Huseinagić.
The reception featured the painting Terminus (the end of the journey) by Robert McNeil, a former forensic expert in Bosnia and Herzegovina, UNESCO Associate Artist, author of Grave Faces and ambassador for the UK’s Srebrenica Remembrance Foundation.
In addition to these high-profile memorial events, the remembrance of the eleven Srebrenica plaques and 1,450 community champions will hold around 1,000 Srebrenica memorial activities in schools, town halls, police stations, mosques, synagogues, churches and community centres across different towns and cities across the country during the UK Memorial. The week from 4 to 11 July makes the UK the world’s largest commemorator of local Srebrenica memorial activities.
Each year, Srebrenica Remembrance UK chooses a theme that not only reflects the aspect of the genocide that must be commemorated, but also speaks to communities in the UK. The theme for 2022 is ‘Fighting Denial: Inciting Hate’. Described by the United Nations as “the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War”, the Srebrenica killings have been classified as genocide by both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Despite this unequivocal fact, denial of the Srebrenica genocide, as well as crimes against humanity committed across Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, continues to prevail among individuals and institutions at the highest levels, including the mayor of Srebrenica, the current political leadership of RS and Serbia, as well as Russia, which vetoed a 2015 UN resolution condemning the Srebrenica killings as genocide.
Srebrenica Remembrance Chairman Dr Waqar Azmi OBE said:
“Denial is last phase of the ten steps to genocide and is now being used to break up the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik who, in seeking support from Russia, is driven by an ideology of unifying the “Serb world” – an idea alarmingly similar to former President Slobodan Milošević’s “Greater Serbia” that supported the Bosnian Serb campaign in the 1990s that culminated in the planned, systematic and industrialized murder of just under 100,000 Muslims, the displacement of two million people and the genocidal rape of 50,000 women simply because of their identity.”
“The horrific scenes from Ukraine and the denial that innocent civilians are being subjected to war crimes by the Russian military show that we cannot be bystanders and therefore this year’s dual-purpose theme seeks to shed light on the importance of fighting denial and the need to confront the hatred behind denial, as well as encourage people to recognise the important role they can play in fighting denial to help build safer, stronger communities for all,” he said.
