Bosnia’s Current Events
The Bosnian genocide is no longer going on today, it ended 20 years ago. To this day, there are still issues that need to be resolved. For example, there are still about 20,00 people who are missing and still have not been found. The people who were involved and committed the crimes in Bosnia, still need to be found and arrested.
Laws were passed after the genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY). It was the first war crimes court ever created by the United Nations and the first international war crimes tribunal since the tribunal held in Nuremberg. This tribunal was so successful, that it influenced the creation of other international criminal courts, like the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Years after the genocide ended, transitional policies like criminal prosecutions, reparations, institutional reform, and truth commissions, were formed. Criminal prosecutions decided who was most responsible. Reparations is when governments recognized and pointed out the type of harms that were suffered and they create something to make up for it. Institutional forms prevent violations from happening again. Truth commissions are initiatives that confess that human rights were violated, these people say the truth about what happened during the genocide. The main law was the one that ended everything, which is called Dayton Accords. This law was a peace agreement between Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, and was signed in 1995. Without these laws, the Bosnian genocide wouldn't have ended.
Of course the people who caused the genocide were punished. In fact, former Yugoslav President Milosevic was arrested in 2001. He went to the International Criminal court in The Hague, on trial, for war crimes in Croatia and being involved in the genocide in Bosnia. Before the trial had ended, on March 11 in 2006, Milosevic died due to health problems, in his prison cell. Over the years participants of the genocide were arrested or are still on trial. Now the people who were were responsible and part of the genocide during the war, were arrested and went on trial. Not everyone who was involved in the war crimes, was arrested,there is still a search for them. The individuals who committed crimes, were convicted by the ICTY. The countries on the west side had put pressure on Serbia to hand over the people who were involved, but are still in Serbia. In 2007, The International Criminal Court decided that the Srebrenica massacre was genocide and broke its responsibility of preventing genocide. Many of the Serbian government officials were accused of genocide and war crimes.
During the attack, the Bosnian Muslims were separated by the Serbian forces at Srebrenica. The women and girls were sent to Bosnian-held territory on buses, where they were raped or sexually assaulted. The men and boys stood behind and were immediately killed or were sent to killing sites on buses. The population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, before the war, was about 4.4million. 1.95 million (44%) of them were Bosnian Muslims. Between 1992 and 1995, about 100,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by the Serbs. The population now isn't the same amount as it was before. Bosnia now has about 3.829 million people.
To remember this tragedy, museums and memorials were created. There is a memorial in Bosnia that was created to remember the victims lives. The Fontbonne University created a project called The Bosnian Memory Project. The purpose of this project was to memorialize those who died in the Bosnian genocide. They do this so that we may never forget those who suffered and died because of the ignorance of others.