25 years after the mass murder at Srebrenica, Hasan Hasanović is fighting against denial of the genocide. As a nineteen-year-old, he survived the Muslim Bosniak death march through the woods of Srebrenica to Tuzla.
His twin brother, his father and his uncle were all murdered in the massacres. Over 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys aged between 13 and 78, were killed by soldiers of the Republika Srpska between 11th and 19th July 1995. Yet many in the region still deny that the genocide took place. To this day, Hasan is haunted by the faces of the dead and the screams of the injured; but he has learned to live with his trauma. He has been gathering documents and interviewing survivors of the massacre for the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial so that the truth will not be forgotten. He is fighting with everything he has against the genocide deniers, who are increasing in number and publicly deny the atrocities. Serbian nationalist politicians repeatedly raise doubts that the genocide took place in the Serbian part of Bosnia. Hasan Hasanović is convinced: only when the truth is acknowledged can there be reconciliation. He also believes that ‘the conflict between Muslim Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs has only been suspended and not resolved.’ In fact, many war criminals have never been charged or prosecuted. Genocide deniers get away with their claims. Hasan Hasanović and his colleagues have documented and collected hundreds of life stories for the archive of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial so that what happened back then in the woods will never be forgotten. ‘My work will only be done when the last survivor has told their story’, he says.
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