Srebrenica Massacre, After 20 Years, Still Casts a Long Shadow in Bosnia

As Europe marks the 20th anniversary of the massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, reconciliation has been halting in a region where memories and wounds, personal and political, run deep.

Bosnian Serb nationalist leaders have sought to play down the events at Srebrenica, and leading Bosnian Muslim officials express frustration that the 1995 Dayton accord, which ended the war, granted the Bosnian Serbs autonomy in their territory.

There is division even over what to call the mass killing. Although two international tribunals based at The Hague have ruled that it constituted genocide, Russia on Wednesday vetoed a draft United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned the massacre as a “crime of genocide,” with its ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, calling the language of the measure “confrontational” and “politically motivated.”