(Washington, D.C., 7/11/2024) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) and American Muslims solemnly observe this day of July 11 – declared by the UN as Srebrenica Massacre Remembrance Day – with our Bosnian Muslim brothers and sisters, over the 1995 preplanned, cold-blooded Serbian genocide of Srebrenica’s 8,372 defenseless, repudiated, and forsaken Bosnian boys and men by the Serbian Army of Republika Srpska Scorpions paramilitary group.
“While the UN designation of July 11th in memory of the thousands of Bosnian Muslims systematically murdered by Bosnian-Serb forces that day chose to name it as a “massacre” instead of the genocide that it was, we welcome this day as a declared memorial for the entire international community in order that it may never be forgotten or repeated,” said Oussama Jammal, USCMO’s secretary general.
“But the fact that we mark this day in the midst of yet another genocide against Muslims being perpetrated in Gaza – a genocide supported by some of the same forces that allowed for Bosnian-Serb forces to overrun UN peacekeepers allegedly protecting the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia – sounds an alarm for persecuted Muslim communities across the planet, including for the Muslims of Bosnia themselves, who again live under a growing threat of genocide,” Jammal said.
USCMO and American Muslims also welcome this international declaration of Srebrenica Massacre Remembrance Day as part of a global antitoxin against widespread and growing propagandistic efforts to contradict, twist, and water down the Srebrenica genocide as the manufacture of politicized imagination, a distortion of deaths justified as an inevitable byproduct to a civil conflict.
“Yet Bosnians as well as the American and world Muslim community will never forget that Srebrenica is a clear and scientifically confirmed genocide,” said Jammal.
After the extermination in 1995, Bosnian-Serb troops dug up some 7,000 of the remains of the boys and men they slaughtered, dismembered them, and scattered them across multiple sites in order to cover up their genocide.
This made identification of loved ones profoundly difficult, some families waiting decades to properly pray over and bury their husbands, sons, brothers, and relatives.
After 29 years of painstaking development of new DNA technology and work by the International Commission on Missing Persons, more than seven thousand Srebrenica genocide victims have been identified and most families have been able to conduct proper services and burials with at least some body parts of their murdered loved ones at Potocari Cemetery, near the genocide cite.
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, established by the UN Security Council, along with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), investigated, tried, and in consensus passed judgment on the Serbian crimes of genocide. In 2017-18, they released the documentary “no room for denial” of the Srebrenica Genocide to unequivocally establish the facts of the Srebrenica genocide.
“Let it also be known that we support, as well, and wholeheartedly extol the commemoration of the Mars Mira (Peace March) that took place in Bosnia July 8th, which many do not know about,” said Jammal.
“Mars Mira is the commemoration of a death march. The procession follows the steps and story of 15,000 Bosniak men after the fall of Srebrenica,” he said.
It marks the 60-mile trek through the woods of the brave men who fought their way out of Srebrenica, rather than entrust their lives to international forces supposedly there to protect them. They fought pitched battles, and hand-to-hand, through the woods until they reached refuge at the village of Nezuk. Only 3,000 of them made it.
Therefore, 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 they were Muslims who believed in Him as One. We ask God to console the hearts of all the loved ones of these boys and men, to grant them solace and unparalleled reward in their pain and suffering, and to grant the Srebrenica victims and their families nearness to God, together, in Paradise.
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