Belated apology

last updated 8 January 2015

Srebrenica, Bosnia

U.N. and European officials apologized to Bosnians this week for failing to prevent the Srebrenica massacre 10 years ago. During the Balkan wars, the city was declared a U.N. “safe area.” But the few hundred Dutch peacekeepers deployed there did not prevent Bosnian Serbs from systematically executing the town’s entire male population—some 8,000 men and boys—in 1995. “It is a shame on the international community that this evil took place under our noses,” said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Bosnian Muslims mostly shrugged off the apologies, saying they’d prefer to see the main perpetrators, former Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, arrested. Both men are believed to be living in the Serbian part of divided Bosnia, and Bosnian officials complain that the international community has done little to capture them.