It's time that after the funeral on July 11th in Srebrenica, several thousand patriots stay overnight, to listen to the courage of criminal minds!

By: Rasim Belko

Srebrenica yesterday marked the thirtieth anniversary of the genocide. Three decades since the bloody July of 1995, when beasts in human form, in just a few days, killed more than eight thousand men and boys simply because they were Muslims, Bosniaks, people with names and surnames who bothered the ethnically pure 'Serbian world'. Three decades since the blackest chapter in the history of Europe after World War II. And what irony – 30 years later, we are still facing the same evil, the same methods, the same sick mentality.

Because it has become a practice that after the commemoration, funeral, and program in Potočari – in the evening, in that same town of death, Serbian nationalists, supported by the Serbian Orthodox Church, open their drunken sessions, play Chetnik songs, decorate cafes and cars with Serbian flags and iconography of war criminals. All over the place, from cafes to private gatherings, a ritual of nationalist rampage takes place, just like a message: "We are the bosses here, and you are just temporary guests of your dead."

And here we come to the key question. While flowers are laid and prayers are recited on one side, on the other side, new massacres are being imagined again. While columns of crying mothers, camp survivors, and descendants leave, as well as everyone who comes to Srebrenica to pay their respects, after they have fulfilled their human, civilizational, and Bosniak duty – the night riders of darkness arrive. And no one, absolutely no one, stops them.

The state, the system? It tries (in)effectively and cowardly. Those who write statements? Their concoction has long been gathering dust in the drawers of prosecutor's offices and the archives of the OHR. For years, we have been watching the same show: we condemn, we express concern, we announce criminal charges – and nothing. Zero. There is not a single serious response.

So I ask myself, and I ask you: Can we, Bosniaks, Bosnians and Herzegovinians who come to Srebrenica on July 11th with respect and reverence, organize to stay? To have three, five, ten thousand of us remain in Potočari and Srebrenica that night? To ensure that these Chetnik orgies can never be held again? To not return to buses and cars as soon as the sun sets, but to build our right to presence, to security, and to dignity?

To see who these wolves are, who these Turks are, and what kind of performance of evil this is!

Because obviously – there is no help from others.

It's time to stop being just one-day visitors to our own wounds. It's time to organize, to be thousands who will stay, sleep over, keep vigil, walk the streets of the city that belongs to both our dead and our living. To set up camps, so that the youth don't go home until the Chetnik songs fall silent.

As long as we retreat at dusk, they will continue their sick festivities. As long as we wait for some institution, some international community, some high representative, or some prosecutor's office to solve this, they will provoke us, spit on us, humiliate us, and dance on our ossuary.

This issue is no longer just a matter of dignity, but a matter of the survival of the culture of remembrance. If we don't do it – no one else will. If we don't do it, all those tears in Potočari will become folklore, and the funerals will become statistics.

Enough statements. Enough pity. It's time for a serious, organized, responsible presence. It's time that Srebrenica is not left on July 11th after the funeral. It's time for light to be stronger than darkness.

If we don't, the villains will.

And then there will be no one left to remember.