On the third and last day, Dizdarevic and most of these round him couldn’t comprise their feelings as they reached Potocari, the positioning of the memorial to Srebrenica victims.
Within the grassy valley dotted with row upon row of white marble tombstones, are the remnants of the grey slab concrete buildings the place the UN Dutch battalion had been stationed to guard Bosniaks in the course of the conflict.
However in July 1995, the battalion was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces, resulting in the bloodshed that ensued.
Reaching the positioning the place 1000’s have been brutally killed introduced “overwhelming disappointment” to Dizdarevic.
“It was very emotional,” he stated.
However Dizdarevic was additionally awash with aid – not solely from the bodily toll of the march being over, but additionally from the emotional weight of getting walked within the footsteps of victims who by no means made it to security.
“It was essential for each considered one of us to complete this march,” he stated.
“This remembrance ought to result in a prevention of potential future genocide.”
As he and his companions arrange one last camp in Potocari, earlier than the memorial occasion there the subsequent day on the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica bloodbath, Dizdarevic contemplated what justice for its victims seems like.
“The seek for justice … is a really tough course of … Much more tough is that the Serbian society … [is] very in favour of this genocide,” he stated.
“I’m afraid that Serbian society – they didn’t endure this catharsis [of] saying, ‘Sure, we did this and we’re responsible, sorry.’ [On the] opposite, they’re very pleased with it … or they deny it.”
Within the years since, the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice and courts within the Balkans have sentenced nearly 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officers collectively to greater than 700 years in jail for the genocide.
However most of the accused stay unpunished, and genocide denial is rampant, particularly amongst political leaders in Serbia and the Serb-majority entity of Republika Srpska.
Milorad Dodik, the entity’s present chief, whose picture seems on billboards flashing the three-finger salute, an emblem of Serb nationalism, has dismissed the Srebrenica genocide as a “fabricated fantasy”.
Nonetheless, Dizdarevic has held on to hope, a sense renewed in the course of the march as he watched numerous younger folks participate, a lot of them born after the Bosnian conflict.
“What’s, for me, essential, [is] that the younger women and men who take part on this march perceive … they need to play an energetic function within the prevention of future genocide by making a constructive atmosphere of their societies,” he stated.
On July 11, the day after the march ended, Dizdarevic and his group joined 1000’s in Potocari to mark the sombre anniversary, the place the stays of seven newly recognized victims have been laid to relaxation.
There, they stood in solemn silence because the coffins have been lowered into freshly dug graves, quickly to be marked with new marble headstones, becoming a member of the greater than 6,000 others already laid to relaxation.
Reporting for this text was made doable by the NGO Islamic Reduction.