On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia, Albrecht Rothacher looks back at the significance of that event, and the confederal State it produced. Three decades on, can the EU realistically consider Bosnia and Herzegovina as a potential member state?
11 July 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the mass murder in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia. For eight days, soldiers of the separatist Republika Srpska, Serbian police, and militiamen under the command of General Ratko Mladić, and with the approval of President Radovan Karadžić, murdered around 8,000 Bosniak prisoners and refugees in that enclave. All the victims were male youths and men of military age. The operation was part of the goal of purging all non-Serbs from their Serbian republic. Mladić and Karadžić, who were subsequently able to hide in Serbia for years, are now serving life sentences issued in The Hague for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
In 2004 the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia declared the Srebrenica massacre a 'genocide'. It remains one of the most serious war crimes committed since World War II.
It also marked the bloodiest climax of the 1991–1995 Bosnian civil war, which had originated in the early 1990s collapse of communism. The establishment of the Yugoslav Communist State in 1945 had allowed antagonistic groups of different religious and ethnic mixes (some of which had fought each other during World War II) to live together under common repression.
But in the early 1990s, when Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, war followed between Serbia and the breakaway republics. And when Bosnia attempted to secede, Serbia, led by Slobodan Milošević, invaded – putatively in defence of Serbian orthodox Christians living there. Then, beginning in 1992, Serbia set out to remove all Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) from Serbia.
The small town of Srebrenica lies on the Serbian border, in an idyllic valley near the Drina River. The Germans who mined silver there in the 14th century knew the town as Silberin. In better days, Srebrenica was a spa resort. During the centuries-long Ottoman occupation, Muslim settlers established an exclave there. Conflict in the Balkans was not uncommon and, during the Second World War, Ustase (Croats) and Chetnik (Serbs) massacred each other in the region after their conquests.
Avenging the murder of Serbs by the Bosniaks of Srebrenica, Serbian General Ratko Mladić subjected the town to a three-year siege
The collapse of communism in the early 1990s unleashed longstanding tensions. In May 1992, the Bosniaks of Srebrenica killed around 1,000 residents in neighbouring Serb villages. By the summer of that year, however, the town found itself surrounded by Serbian troops. Like Goražde before it, Srebrenica became a refuge, packed with 40,000 Bosniak refugees.
After a three-year siege – the capital Sarajevo, with a population of 360,000 at the time, was besieged and shelled by Mladić for four years, killing 10,000 – the UN stationed just under 400 men from a lightly armed Dutchbat battalion in Srebrenica as blue helmets, without a combat mission, to protect the refugees and the population.
Encountering little resistance, Mladić therefore easily succeeded in capturing Srebrenica on 11 July 1995. He disarmed the Dutch, had around 25,000 women, children, and the elderly deported, and promised freedom to all Bosniak prisoners, except for war criminals. Yet, despite his promise, the 8,000–9,000 remaining men Mladić had transported to various locations, where they were mercilessly and indiscriminately shot, and then buried in mass graves.
In response, NATO, with the UN's blessing, launched heavy bombing raids. The tide of war turned. Croatia recaptured the 'Serbian Republic of Krajina' and western Slavonia. In December 1995, US Special Representative Richard Holbrooke forced Milošević, Franjo Tuđman, and Alija Izetbegović to agree to a cantonal solution for Bosnia and Herzegovina in the so-called Dayton Agreement.
After 100,000 people had been killed and two million displaced, the Americans were concerned with ending the fighting, not establishing a viable state.
In the federation that was set up, with 16 ministers (eight Bosniaks, five Croats, and three Serbs) at the top, two entities – the Bosniak-Croat Confederation and the Republika Srpska – remain to this day. Among them are ten ethnically relatively homogeneous cantons, insofar as this was possible in that patchwork of passions and religions.
In total, the country's administration comprises three presidents, 13 prime ministers, 700 members of parliament, and more than 180 ministers. This vast array of appointees is supposed to somehow lead what is by far the most complicated system of government in the world – for a country of just 3.2 million people. They do this, understandably, in their own way, according to national custom. Clientelism and corruption are, unsurprisingly, rife.
Bosnia and Herzegovina's byzantine administration comprises 13 prime ministers, 700 MPs and more than 180 ministers – for a country of just 3.2 million people
The result is an absurd bureaucracy that tends to paralyse all economic development. Everything is ethnically segregated, from the decaying railway companies to refuse collection and the education system. Unemployment stands at 40%. Emigration and minimal birth rates, along with the war, have reduced the population by about a third from its peak, in 1990, of 4.5 million.
And the international response to the dysfunctional artificial state it has created? There is a High Representative with almost dictatorial powers, who commands the 1,000 troops of EUFOR in Operation Althea.
The High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina has almost dictatorial powers, including the right to block legislation and the appointment of government officials
He has the right to block legislation and the appointment of government officials – and therefore cannot please anyone. Since August 2021, German politician Hans Christian Schmidt, a lawyer from the Fürth constituency who was Minister of Agriculture under Angela Merkel, has held this position. In common with all Germans, Schmidt is regularly denounced as pro-Croat.
To cap the international mismanagement of this flawed state, the EU decided to elevate Bosnia and Herzegovina to the status of candidate for accession. In 2022, the Von der Leyen Commission decided, with the blessing of the 27 member states, to begin accession negotiations. And every high-ranking EU visitor to Sarajevo reinforces the illusion that EU membership prospects are real.
After thirty years, it has been a long road from Srebrenica, but a hard journey still lies ahead.
