Category: News and Events

The exhibitions of the Srebrenica Memorial Center and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIRN BiH) – “From Words to Violence: Lives Behind the Fields of Death” and “Legacy of Hope After the Srebrenica Genocide 1995: The Journey of a New Generation,” originally presented in 2025 to mark the 30^th anniversary of the genocide, will reopen at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York.

Prepared last year for the 30^th anniversary commemorations, these exhibitions will for the first time be presented together this July in the exhibition space at UN headquarters.

The first part of the exhibition offers insight into the genocide against Bosniaks committed in Srebrenica in July 1995 through photographs of everyday objects that testify to lives violently interrupted, families permanently separated, and the consequences of hate speech and indifference in the face of hatred.

The second part presents the stories of eight young people who were children in 1995 or who were born after the genocide. Their stories and photographs bear witness to human resilience and the transformative power of love despite unimaginable loss. They highlight a new generation that preserves memory and fosters a culture of empathy and peace.

Chaloka Beyani, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, told Detektor that it is crucial to continue telling the story of Srebrenica to preserve the memory of the victims, support survivors’ testimonies, and contribute through storytelling to the prevention of future crimes.

“That is precisely why it is important for these two deeply moving and personal exhibitions to be presented again, this time together, at the United Nations’ headquarters, offering visitors and delegations a comprehensive account of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide – so that they may know, learn, and remember,” he said.

In his view, artistic reflection “provides us with space to confront painful memories, transform them into something that connects us as human beings, and use them for education and prevention.

“I am aware that these exhibitions touch on painful and traumatic experiences. However, they serve a higher purpose – to spare future generations from the same pain and trauma. We are united in achieving that goal,” Beyani added.

Hasan Hasanovic, head of the Oral History team at the Srebrenica Memorial Center, said it is extremely important that these exhibitions are presented again this year for the education of visitors interested in the Srebrenica genocide.

“The Memorial Center and its partners, including BIRN, demonstrate the capacity to produce such important content at a high level on the most significant platform in the world,” he said.

Denis Dzidic, Executive Director of BIRN BiH, noted that the fact these two exhibitions are being presented again at UN headquarters, this time as a unified whole, shows how important it is to continue conveying the story of Srebrenica through human experiences and testimonies.

“We owe the greatest gratitude to the survivors and the families of victims who entrusted us with their stories, personal belongings, and memories. Their willingness to speak has ensured that the lives of their loved ones are not reduced to mere numbers and statistics, but are remembered as the stories of real people—their families, dreams, and everyday lives,” Dzidic said.

The exhibitions, he added, remind us that prevention begins with understanding, listening and a willingness to confront the consequences of hatred and dehumanization.

“Our task is not only to preserve the memory of the past but to ensure that survivors’ experiences become part of the education of future generations. Only in this way can the testimonies we have collected continue to serve as both a warning and a call to responsibility,” he said.

Last year, the exhibitions were opened at UN headquarters, as previously reported by Detektor.

The project “Lives Behind the Fields of Death” began in October 2020, when 100 testimonies of genocide survivors were recorded. These are now part of the permanent exhibition, along with objects donated by survivors for permanent preservation in a memorial room opened at the Memorial Center in February 2022. Following positive reactions, the project continued with the recording of another 100 oral histories.

The combined exhibition will be open from July 17 to August 28 in the exhibition space at UN headquarters, which is free and open to the public.

by Dzana Brkanic

‘Facing Srebrenica: Views from the Besieged City’ opened at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre on Tuesday, presenting photographs from Dutch UN peacekeeping troops that depict everyday life in the wartime enclave – as well as numerous people whose lives violently ended during the July 1995 genocide of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces.

The exhibition, which opened ahead of the annual genocide commemoration on July 11, is the first outcome of a joint project between the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for Military History, BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Srebrenica Memorial Centre.

The project has so far collected 12,000 private photographs taken by members of the UN Dutch Battalion who were stationed in Srebrenica between February 1994 and July 1995, offering a rare visual insight into everyday life in the besieged town.

The photographs show a place where movement was restricted and everyday supplies scarce, but also where life didn’t just stop.

“They depict Srebrenica’s life and culture in the toughest days – sport, art, resistance, but unfortunately also hunger,” BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina’s director Denis Dzidic said at the opening of the exhibition.

The director of the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, Emir Suljagic, said that the photographs complement the permanent collection at the centre, which aims to inform and educate the public about the genocide in which more than 7,000 men and boys were killed.

“We only have photographs of about half of the victims of the genocide, and it is our great hope that this way, through these photographs, we will find a greater number of others,” Suljagic said.

The design and development of this innovative digital tool, through the technology of augmented reality (AR), enables the marking and documentation of places of suffering in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was fully financed by the European Union with 290,000 KM.

At the launch, the director of BIRN Bosnia, Denis Džidić, emphasized the importance of using modern technologies in memorialization efforts, especially in order to make memorialization more approachable to younger generations.

“Through an innovative approach, we wanted to move the story forward, to younger generations, to show them how the memorials should look like in reality. In this app, the content is also composed of court-established facts and virtual elements, but also witness testimonies from all locations,” Džidić explained.

The opening address also highlighted the importance of creating an inclusive and fact-based approach to memorialization. Karel Lizerot, Head of Good Governance at the Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina, told the participants that he was both personally and professionally proud of this project, adding that there is still room to work further on transitional justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“In Bosnia and Herzegovina, we support the memory culture and enable the victims, their families, individuals to go back to facts, locations and events that are court-established, so this application is important not only for Bosnia and Herzegovina but also to its path towards the European Union. Transitional justice is one of the key areas that Bosnia and Herzegovina needs to deal with on this path,” Lizerot said.

The application enables users to access virtual monuments at more than 50 unmarked sites of war crimes throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina via augmented reality, thereby symbolically marking and occupying in the digital space locations that have not received official markings.

In addition to AR content, the application contains narratives about each location based on court-established facts, video testimonies of survivors and family members of the victims, photographic and archival materials, as well as an interactive map that connects the places of suffering into a unique digital space of memory.

In this way, users may gain a new understanding of the events of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina through a combination of facts, personal stories and multimedia content.

The findings of two strategic documents dealing with memorialization in Bosnia and Herzegovina were also presented at the conference. Lejla Gačanica presented an analysis of the legal framework for memorialization, while Eldin Hadžović spoke about existing initiatives and good practices for marking places of remembrance throughout the country.

Gačanica outlined that memorialization is starting to be seen as the fifth pillar of transitional justice indicating why and how we should preserve the memory of events from the past. That is, how do we memorialize what happened and how past events affect reparations and speaking the truth, guaranteeing the prevention of such crimes from being committed again.

“Memorialization must not be a unified narrative that suppresses everything else, but a space where different perspectives are acknowledged. Everyone has their own perspective on what happened, but with full respect for the facts without any relativization and, of course, with full respect for the war victims,” ​​Hadžović said.

A special focus of the event was the panel discussion, “Memorialization through the process of accession to the European Union”, where participants discussed the role of the culture of memory, transitional justice and dealing with the past in the context of the European integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Panelists stressed the importance of developing memorialization policies that contribute to social dialogue, reconciliation and the protection of human rights.

Amer Đulić, a camp survivor and president of the Association of Detainees from Stolac, recalled that, back in 2017, they had submitted a request to Bosnia’s Council of Ministers to allocate space for a memorial room to murdered wartime camp inmates – but had never received a response.

He stated that, a year ago, they also initiated the memorialization process through the detainees’ association and non-governmental organisations in order to have a memorial centre, not to tell the story of one group of people but of all groups and their suffering in the war.

He called the new memorialization application “a story that touched me so much and that is so good”.

Many of his fellow former camp inmates from Stolac have now left the country, he said, but now “they will have the opportunity to get some information, because our younger generations no longer read the books we write and they don’t watch TV. What they want are cell phones, what they’re looking for, they’ll be looking for inside their phones,” Đulić said.

The presentation of the application is part of a wider effort to improve the availability of information about the places of suffering and preserve the memory of the victims through innovative and accessible digital formats.

For more information about the application and the project, visit the website www.virtualnasjecanja.detektor.ba.

The Virtual Memories project was implemented with the financial support of the European Union in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Irvin Pekmez studied journalism at the University of Sarajevo. During that time, he had his journalistic heroes and other role models from the culture of public debate and “wanted to be like them when I grew up”.

“I don’t know how far I got with that,” he jokes modestly, although he has, in fact, been awarded for his work.

He first heard about BIRN in his previous work for other media outlets.

“We relied on the work of the [BIRN] Sarajevo office for specific topics, especially those related to war crimes and trials. Of course, I later learned that BIRN is much more than that,” he explains.

His main focus now at BIRN, in addition to social problems, is foreign influence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “The relentless abuse of the BiH system and all the systemic loopholes, along with unfulfilled agendas from the 1990s, require tireless observation and reporting to the public about the fact that the fight for this society is not over.” Irvin says.

There are several obstacles to investigative journalists’ work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he notes.

“One of the biggest burdens is the lack of interest among young journalists to engage in this type of journalism. Pressure on a bad system requires, among other things, people who will apply that pressure. If there were more of us, it would be easier,” he says.

Of all his investigations, he is most proud of some. One is “Black-Clad ‘Humanitarians’ Promote Pro-Russian Agenda in Bosnia”, which was his first significant story published in BIRN.

“The Hostomel Filmmaker: Hunt for war criminals with the help of surveillance cameras” was one of many stories he got from a Kyiv visit in 2023. “A profound and deep human experience that I will never forget and that impacted me for life,” Irvin recalls.

Speaking of Ukraine, Pekmez worked on another investigation, which he came across totally unintentionally.

“From Bosnia to Ukraine: How a Serb Sportsman Became a Russian Fighter” is an example of “how a significant and influential story can be born from a random scroll through clips from Ukraine”, he adds.

“I don’t think there will be a repeat of the story about which I did two investigations with my colleagues,” he recalls, of “Disruptors: Inside Russia’s Balkan Training Camps for Moldovan ‘Destabilisation’”, and “Military Drones, Incendiary Devices: How Russian Trainers Taught Subversion at Balkan Camps” and other significant analyses and news, which eventually received a journalistic award.

“Because the authorities in Republika Srpska, despite all Detektor‘s evidence, continue to deny everything – there is a strange satisfaction in that,” Pekmez stresses.

Recently, with Detektor colleagues Enes Hodzic and Nino Bilajac, and the media outlet CU SENS, he won second place at the Superscrieri journalism awards in Romania in the TV and Video Journalism category.

Together with the organisation FactCheck from Bulgaria, they showed how people from Moldova were being trained in Russia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to use weapons and drones carrying explosive devices for use in potential mass unrest in Moldova. This is a story that had been going on for two years. Irvin is glad they did not give up.

“It took a lot of time, building a network of trust with important people and a network of cooperation with journalists from Serbia and Moldova,” he recalls.

“The security aspect of this story is what, among other problems, moves the journalistic interest the most: the possibility that someone close to you is being trained for violent illegal tasks, and that the police who are in charge of your security belong to a system that denies all of this.

“The essence of danger and proof of how a state can, in peacetime, support a foreign paramilitary factor without having to explain itself,” Irvin explains.

Outside BIRN, Irvin likes to run in his spare time.

For young people who want to work as investigative journalists in the region, he has an encouraging message – it’s more fun than you think.

“Do you want to use your skills and curiosity to fight the system that is rigged against you? Then join us, we are fun and have snacks,” he concludes.