July 11 – 22, 1995 · Eastern Bosnia Theater
July 11 – 22, 1995
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb Army forces under General Ratko Mladić overran the UN-declared 'safe area' of Srebrenica, protected by a Dutch UNPROFOR battalion that numbered roughly 400 lightly armed soldiers. Mladić appeared before cameras promising the women and children they would be safe. Over the next seven days, his forces separated approximately 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from the refugee columns seeking safety at a nearby UN base, transported them to sites across eastern Bosnia, and executed them in the worst act of genocide in Europe since the Nazi Holocaust. The Dutch UN soldiers were powerless — or unwilling — to intervene. The victims' bodies were buried in mass graves, then exhumed and moved to secondary and tertiary graves in an attempt to hide the evidence.
Commanders