1995: Bosnian Serb Forces Seize Srebrenica, Launching Europe's Worst Genocide Since WWII
Eight thousand men and boys. That is the number international courts later confirmed were systematically murdered in the days after July 11, 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladić rolled into the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a UN-declared "safe area" guarded by a lightly armed Dutch peacekeeping battalion. Mladić's soldiers separated Bosniak Muslim men and boys from women, loaded them onto buses, transported them to nearby fields and warehouses, and shot them in mass executions over the following days. The Dutch peacekeepers, vastly outnumbered and given no air support, stood aside. Survivors fled through the forest toward Tuzla while bodies were buried in mass graves, then secretly reburied to conceal evidence. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice both ruled the killings constituted genocide. Mladić was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to life in prison. Srebrenica permanently reshaped international norms around humanitarian intervention, the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, and the prosecution of war crimes, a reckoning the world is still navigating.