1995: Srebrenica Falls, Europe's Darkest Hour Since Hitler
More than 7,000 names. That is the count of Bosniak boys and men whom Bosnian Serb forces systematically hunted down after General Ratko Mladić's troops overran the UN-declared "safe area" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia on July 6, 1995. Dutch UNPROFOR peacekeepers, badly outnumbered and under-equipped, stood aside as Mladić's soldiers separated men and boys from women on the outskirts of town, loaded the men onto buses, and drove them to execution sites across the Drina valley. Within days, mass graves stretched across the hills of eastern Bosnia. International tribunals at The Hague later convicted Mladić and former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadžić of genocide, the first such convictions on European soil since Nuremberg. The slaughter forced a brutal reckoning with the limits of UN peacekeeping, reshaped international humanitarian law, and stands today as the defining warning against the world's willingness to call atrocities by any name other than what they are.