Washington, D.C.; (7/11/2023) – The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) and American Muslims grieve this day of July 11 with our Bosnian Muslim sisters and brothers, mothers, fathers, and children, over the 1995 planned and premeditated Serbian genocide of Srebrenica’s 8,372 helpless, betrayed, and abandoned Bosnian boys and men by the Serbian Army of Republika Srpska Scorpions paramilitary group.
“Still today, 28 years after this clear Serbian-perpetrated genocide, Bosnian Muslims will reinter in Srebrenica’s Potocari Cemetery the remains of 30 of their fathers, sons, and brothers recently discovered in hidden mass graves that have been moved two or three times to hide the crime of Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims,” said Oussama Jammal, USCMO’s secretary general.
USCMO and American Muslims also condemn in the strongest terms widespread propagandistic efforts to deny, distort, and dilute this genocide as mere imagination or mass killings in a civil conflict zone.
“Somehow, in the face of clear and gruesome evidence, Serbian, supremacist, and religious nationalist propaganda is now rampant in the world outright denying the Srebrenica genocide or distorting and minimizing it by calling it a “massacre” or “mass killing.” But neither the Bosnians nor the American and world Muslim community will every forget what this was – a clear and undeniable genocide.”
As the UN Security Council-mandated International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (“Mechanism”) has established, there is “no room for denial” of the Srebrenica Genocide, as has the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) investigated, prosecuted and unequivocally passed judgment on the Serbian crimes of genocide.
On this day, we pray for the Bosnian victims of this Serbian genocide, ask God to accept them as martyrs, killed for no other reason than their belief in Him as One, and we ask God to ease the pain and console the hearts of all the loved ones of these boys and men. May they be near Him in Paradise.
