LiberPress Association Award 2007

The Srebrenica Mothers (Srebrenica and Zepa). Srebrenica, a small town in Northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, was considered a safe haven in 1995 during the Balkan War. There, in a car battery factory, the Bosnian Muslim civilian population took refuge under the protection of the UN, which deployed a force of 600 Dutch blue helmets. In June 1995, Serbian troops commanded by General Ratko Mladić, accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal, and currently at large, “obliged” the UN forces to hand over these civilians, killing more than 8,000 children and men aged 7 to 70 in cold blood and burying them all in common graves. There are, however, more than 6,000 still unaccounted for (8,372 is only the number of bodies found so far). The massacre of Srebrenica is considered as genocide by the UN.

The Srebrenica Mothers Foundation is currently presided over by Munira Subasic (22 of her relatives are buried in the cemetery and her son is missing), assisted by Sabra Kolenovic in Girona; It was created to denounce the passivity of the West in the face of war and genocide, to bring those guilty of the massacre to international courts, keep the memory of this horror alive, enable people to recover their dead and give them a decent burial and organize themselves so that they could rebuild their lives and their economy. They have done outstanding work in denouncing the event and organising themselves.