Sheila Osmanovic on genocide, xenophobia and the dangerous lesson of forgetting
Thirty years after Srebrenica, the word “unfinished” still fits. The genocide in Bosnia of July 1995 — the systematic killing of more than 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica — was judged a genocide by international courts, yet its reverberations remain a living wound: families still search for remains, verdicts backlog in domestic courts, while political narratives seek to minimise or reframe what happened. Remembering Srebrenica is not an act of ritual but a warning: atrocity does not end with a treaty or a headline; it metastasises when memory and responsibility are allowed to atrophy.
Genocide does not erupt from a vacuum. It grows in the soil of ethnic fear, political opportunism, historical grievance and economic collapse. In the former Yugoslavia, that process looked familiar to anyone who has watched modern democracies fray: year after year of escalating rhetoric, football terraces turned into staging grounds for nationalist fury, and politicians who found advantage in drawing sharper lines between “us” and “them.” What began as chants and small outbreaks of intolerance hardened into policies and campaigns of dispossession. The lesson is grimly simple — hostile language on the radio and in stadiums can be a precursor to bullets and barbed wire. The Bosnian experience taught us that social intimacy (neighbours, schools, shared public life) is no guarantee against engineered hatred.
We see the same mechanics today, though in different constellations. Israel’s full-scale invasion of Gaza has produced widespread civilian suffering, documented patterns of indiscriminate attacks and other abuses that human-rights monitors say amount to genocide. Large numbers of civilian deaths, collapsing health systems and severe food insecurity generate not only immediate suffering but long memories of grievance and exclusion that fuel future violence. The international legal and moral architecture that ought to prevent atrocity strains under geopolitical realpolitik, even as investigators and courts try to hold perpetrators to account.
At the same time, the human toll in Ukraine — and the regional and global reactions it provokes — shows how quickly conflict becomes a moral and humanitarian catastrophe. Humanitarian agencies warn that aid delivery and recovery are chronically undermined by political and logistical obstacles: crises do not end when ceasefires are brokered if reconstruction, justice and reconciliation are not part of the bargain.
Britain is not immune to these currents. The same divisive narratives that poison public life elsewhere also find purchase here: scapegoating of migrants, the weaponisation of religion and identity, and periodic spikes in hate crime during moments of international crisis. Official statistics show the persistent scale of hate-motivated offences recorded by police and experienced by communities — a reality that should disturb any country that believes itself resilient against extremism. National political discourse matters: when mainstream debate ignites dehumanising portrayals of whole communities, it lowers the barrier to violence.
So what does “unfinished business in Bosnia” demand of us now? First, rigorous memory: commemoration must be accompanied by education and institutional candour about causes and failures. Second, prevention means taking seriously the mundane enablers of atrocity — discriminatory policies, impunity for hate crimes, the normalisation of exclusionary language on mainstream platforms. Third, justice must be active not symbolic: prosecutions, reparations and transparent truth-seeking are essential to break cycles of vengeance and denial. Finally, solidarity matters. When communities mobilise for the protection of the vulnerable and insist on empathy across difference, they erect a counterweight to the small-step radicalisation that turned football shouting into ethnic cleansing in the 1990s.
The Bosnia case shows another uncomfortable truth: international intervention that freezes conflict without repairing the social and political foundations of coexistence can leave a country fragmented and vulnerable to renewed violence. Equally, contemporary conflicts highlight the limits of diplomacy that ignores civilian protection and long-term reconciliation. If “never again” is to mean anything, it must translate into sustained political will: to document, to teach, to prosecute, and to resist the rhetoric that makes neighbours into enemies.
Finally, the work is also local. In towns and schools and social spaces in Britain and beyond, we must resist the small humiliations — jokes, exclusions, casual xenophobia — that accrete into policy and persecution. We must ask hard questions of leaders who trade identity for votes and of media that amplify division. Remembering Srebrenica is painful precisely because it shows how quickly civility can be stripped away; its lesson is that vigilance, decency and justice are not optional extras but the bulwarks against atrocity.
If there is unfinished business from the Bosnian war and genocide, it is this: to convert memory into a durable politics of protection, and to keep insisting — in law, policy and everyday life — that human dignity is not negotiable.