Srebrenica 30
July 11 is the international day of remembering the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, also officially recognized by the United Nations since 2024. On the 30th anniversary, in an extremely tense domestic political and prevalent genocide denial atmosphere instigated by the leadership of Republika Srpska and openly encouraged from Serbia, seven newly identified victims were put to final rest in the cemetery across the road from the Srebrenica Memorial Center in Potočari.
The Srebrenica Memorial Center (SMC) is a research center, archives, and exhibition venue dedicated to researching the genocide committed by the Bosnian Serb Army under the watch of the international community in the former UN “safe area”; SMC has also been in charge of organizing the commemoration and reburial of victims. This year's widely observed event was accompanied by an international conference entitled Education and Research on Genocide, as well as the week-long Second Independent International Summer School “Genocide Studies.” This latter included lectures on the role of oral history and archives in handling difficult heritage, tours of the exhibition halls and archives of SMC, and field trips to locations of special importance in the genocide, including gathering points on routes of escape, detention centers, and execution and mass grave sites.
The Blinken OSA Archivum has been a long-time partner and supporter of the Srebrenica Memorial Center. It helped the SMC establish a state-of-the-art archival facility, trained its staff online and in-person in Budapest, and co-organized professional work visits to European institutions of social memory, while facilitated the networking of SMC with organizations and individuals working in archiving, managing cultural heritage and forensic science.
Chief Archivist and Head of Human Rights Program Csaba Szilágyi represented the Blinken OSA Archivum at these events. He lectured at the summer school on the importance and challenges of archiving documents of violent pasts as part of memory work in a postwar context and presented the Archivum’s past projects specifically on the Srebrenica genocide, including the exhibition entitled Srebrenica-Exhumation. He emphasized that the availability and efficient use of archives related to mass atrocities and genocide committed during the Bosnian wars may help communities and scholars in supporting the findings of international criminal tribunals and in countering attempts on rewriting the history of Srebrenica and labeling the genocide committed there as “untrue.”
Szilágyi met with the archives team at the SMC led by Azir Osmanović, and one of the Archivum’s donors, the journalist David Rohde, present at the conference, whose research collection on Srebrenica is already available for the public at the Archivum, and was also donated in digital format to the Memorial Center on the occasion of opening the SMC Archives in 2021.
