Subašić: For 30 years, we have been listening to how the criminals who killed our children are the greatest heroes

(Patria) - A ceremony for the National Day of Remembrance of Srebrenica was held today at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, United Kingdom.

Around 2,000 guests were present, including the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, members of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Željko Komšić and Denis Bećirović, Reis-ul-ulema Husein ef. Kavazović, the UK Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister for Faith and Communities.

Munira Subašić, president of the association "Movement of Mothers of the Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves," addressed the attendees, sharing her difficult life story.

She recounted that 22 members of her immediate family were killed in the genocide, including her husband and her youngest son, whom she loved most in the world.

We are presenting her address in full.

Today, I will address you on my behalf, on behalf of thousands of mothers whose children were innocently killed in Srebrenica, in the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It is difficult to describe our pain and our sorrow, which we have carried for 30 years, because our children were innocently killed.

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Komšić: Srebrenica reminds us for 30 years that peace is not just the absence of war — peace requires justice, truth, and dignity!

(Patria) - Member of the BiH Presidency Željko Komšić attended the commemoration on the occasion of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland's National Day of Remembrance of the Srebrenica genocide, at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, at the invitation of the organ

Our children were killed, and the world and Europe watched silently. Our children were killed simply because they had a different name, a different surname, and because they were Muslims. They killed our children under protection, under a flag, before the eyes of the whole world, under the protection of the United Nations.

But we, the mothers who lost our children, had one goal: to raise our children without hatred and without revenge.

After the genocide, five and a half thousand children were left without their parents. Children watched their fathers being killed, their mothers being raped, their brothers being taken to their deaths; they survived the genocide.

Many children were born after their father's death. And the criminals not only killed our children, they also killed memories. So that our children who were young did not remember their fathers, mothers, and they did not have photographs to know what they looked like.

Often, our children asked us, do I resemble my father, do I resemble my mother, do I have a smile, do I have hair? It's terrible. And we always said, we must raise these children without hatred, without revenge. Thank God we succeeded in that.

We educated our children. They are our best children in the world, not just in Bosnia. Now they are engineers, doctors, professors, they speak several foreign languages.

Wherever I go, and I travel all over the world, I always find a fellow Bosnian and Herzegovinian. You find our pride. We mothers succeeded in raising them to be the best among the best.

My son Nermin, who was killed, if he were alive, I, as a mother, would be proud of him. He would be a good son, a good father, a good husband, a good citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Unfortunately, his enemies did not let him live. They did not only kill my son, they also killed his life, they killed the family he would have had. I would have been proud as a grandmother to have grandchildren, a daughter-in-law, his family.

However, I stand here today peacefully and call on all people of goodwill, especially the people of Great Britain, to help us build a better future for our children, to help us preserve the verdicts, to help us become stronger, to help us stop denying the genocide, to stop glorifying war criminals.

That is the most important thing, because we mothers have been listening for 30 years to how the criminals who killed us and our children are the greatest heroes. This has been going on for 30 years.

We know that we cannot bring back the dead, but we must punish the criminals. If our children have names and surnames as victims of genocide, we demand from the world, from Europe, from everyone, that all criminals who committed crimes, genocide, have their names and surnames as criminals.

We mothers, although we lost our children in the genocide, still found the strength to support other mothers, both in Bosnia, in the Balkans, and around the world, to work together, to build together, to condemn all that has happened, to somehow help each other, to find the bones of our children.

I call on you, all good people, to help us, to protect the verdicts, to find the bones of our children, for the criminals to face justice, because the genocide that happened, happened. We have verdicts, we have a large memorial, the white tombstones speak for themselves, I invite you all to come to Potočari, to see, to feel, and to imagine what the human mind could do at the end of the 20th, at the beginning of the 21st century. It is a great injustice that the world and Europe supported.

If the world and Europe had learned anything, neither Ukraine, nor Palestine, nor many places that are happening now would be burning today.

While we stand here, listening silently, a large number of mothers will still cry, searching for what we are searching for, and that is the most important thing, the bones of our children. Differences are good, divisions are not. Let's not divide ourselves into these and those.

Let's divide ourselves into good and bad people. Let's divide ourselves as we should, not by who belongs to this group or that. We are all human beings, we all want to live, and no one has the right to kill anyone's children or anyone's mothers - said Subašić.