The Academy of Bosnia and Herzegovina organized an OSI-sponsored event commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. "Ten Years After" featured an art exhibition, an installation, a film screening, and presentations by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Roy Gutman and Srebrenica survivor Sejdefa Ðoziæ at UN Headquarters in New York City.
Srebrenica, declared the world's first UN Safe Area, was the site of the worst case of genocide in Europe since World War II. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to the Srebrenica enclave, where tens of thousands of civilians had taken refuge from earlier offensives in Bosnia. Over the course of the month, while the international community and UN peacekeepers looked on, the soldiers separated Muslim families and murdered more than 7,000 men and boys.
Commemorative events included:
- An art exhibition featuring photographs and multimedia works by young Bosnian, American, and international artists influenced by the genocide and its aftermath.
- An art installation, titled "Why are you not here?" by Bosnian-American artist Aida Sehovic. The installation, based on the Bosnian tradition of gathering for coffee, uses coffee, soil, and more than 1,000 coffee cups, with each cup signifiying one Srebrenica victim identified and reburied to date.
- A screening of the film Crime and Punishment, which documents the siege and aftermath in Srebrenica. With footage of some of the men who orchestrated the massacre, the film has been shown to the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
- Presentations by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Roy Gutman and Srebrenica survivor Sejdefa Ðoziæ, both of whom will reflect on the meaning and memory of the genocide. Roy Gutman is Newsday s foreign editor, a diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek magazine, and director of American University's Crimes of War Project, and is best known for his award-winning coverage of the 1993 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he provided the first documented reports of concentration camps. Sejdefa, who lost her father during the massacre, will discuss her first-hand experiences of the genocide and its immediate aftermath.
For more information visit http://www.academybh.org/srebrenica.htm.
