GAZA (Dispatches) – Ahmed Hrustanovic is a 39-year-old imam from Srebrenica, a town in Bosnia Herzegovina that became notorious after at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were summarily executed by Serb forces in July 1995.
He was nine at the time, and living in an accommodation center for displaced people near the city of Tuzla, having been deported from Srebrenica in 1993 with his mother and sister.
But the vast majority of Ahmed’s family, including his father, remained in Srebrenica.
He recalls the fear everyone felt for their loved ones upon hearing the news that Srebrenica had fallen to Serb forces.
“It was clear to us all what was about to happen to our loved ones,” he said, speaking to Middle East Eye at the mosque in the center of the town where he works.
Thirty years on from the killings, widely branded a genocide, Hrustanovic sees parallels in Israel’s attack on Gaza - also widely assessed by genocide scholars to be a genocide.
“We were in that situation where they [Serb and Croat forces] were attacking from all sides, and they wouldn’t let us defend ourselves,” he said, referring to the international community.
“Unfortunately, we’re witnesses that the international community does not exist the way we’re used to - that it would stand on the side of justice, democracy. Democracy no longer exists in the world; you can see that it’s only the law of the strongest that counts,” he told MEE.
Fadila Efendic, the 84-year-old president of the Mothers of Srebrenica association, always thought that what took place at Srebrenica would be the last of its kind.
“But politics are terrible,” she told Middle East Eye from her house in Potocari, the village in Srebrenica that now hosts a memorial center for the killings.
“The interests of great powers are paid for by small people with their lives. [The great powers] want to rule the world.”
Just as the international community did not react in Bosnia, they’re also not responding to the genocide in Gaza, she said.
“They work against [ordinary] people just for the interests of [annexing] territory - killing people and expelling them. It won’t end well,” she said.
Efendic recalled the heavy shooting and shelling from all sides by Serb forces on 11 July 1995; it was difficult just to reach the UN base in Potocari alive and seek refuge. People were panicking and no one knew what to do.
“It was the so-called ‘protected zone’, but every day they were shelling. What did [the UN] protect? They only protected Serbs. They handed us over to them to be killed,” she said.