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A Voice For the Voiceless

The Advocacy Project helps marginalized communities to tell their story, claim their rights and produce social change. We recruit graduate students to volunteer as Peace Fellows with partners.

The Impact of Service "Speaking with locals and living in a country is the best way to learn about the real lives of citizens, not just the stories in the mainstream media. I will be more critical of what I read as a result of this experience. I also feel even more grateful for my education, and I feel a stronger responsibility to assist others who do not have resources or access to opportunities in their communities." Maria Skouras (New York University) volunteered in 2011 as a Peace Fellow for eHomemakers in Malaysia. For more 2011 feedback click here.

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War and Massacre

By 1992, the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia was subject to two competing pressures. Most Bosnians sought to follow the other republics of Croatia and Slovenia, and seek their independence from Yugoslavia. On the other hand, Bosnia’s Serbs sought to unite with Serbs from other Yugoslav republics to form any ethnically pure Greater Serbia. This tension had already torn Croatia apart. It posed a greater threat to Bosnia, which was more ethnically integrated.

Bosnian Serbs moved against the Muslims and Croats in the north and east of Bosnia in March 1992. They forced hundreds of thousands from their homes by ethnic cleansing, and detained thousands in camps – Omarska, Trnoplje, Keraterm – that became synonymous with killing, torture, rape, castration, starvation, and forced labor.

In 1993 the UN named six “safe areas,” including Srebrenica, which was cut off and besieged by the Serbs for the next two years. Srebrenica became so crowded with refugees that thousands were sleeping in the streets. The town was becoming a "concentration camp without barbed wire,” in the words of journalist Emir Suljagic.

AP has produced several authoritative reports on Srebrenica’s long agony. In 2000, AP writer Peter Lippman made the first of several visits to Srebrenica and described the terrible conditions during the 3-year siege. He also addressed the controversial role of Nasir Oric, the Muslim commander in Srebrenica who briefly went on the offensive against the Serb besiegers in 1993.

There was so little space during the siege that the dead had to   be buried on surrounding hills. The graves have not been   disturbed. .

On 11 July 1995, Srebrenica fell to the invading Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic. The Serb soldiers separated out the women, children, boys below the age of 15, and men above military age, and put them on buses to be driven to the edge of Muslim-controlled territory. The UN Blue Helmets did not intervene. The rest of the military-age men, over the next couple of days, were taken away to be killed. More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, leaving thousands of women as head of households. 7,500 Muslims tried to escape Srebrenica through the hills in what has since been called the march of death: many were killed in Serb ambushes and scores committed suicide in desperation. Peter Lippman described the massacre in vivid detail in one of his 2000 reports. In July 2005, AP volunteer Sabri Ben-Achour retraced the route of the 1995 march with some of the survivors and described the experience in a blog. The Dayton peace conference (21 November 1995) finally brought a cease-fire in Bosnia, but at a high cost.

Bosnia remained a sovereign nation but divided into two autonomous entities – the Confederation (Muslims and Croats) and the Republika Srpska (Republic of Serbia). Srebrenica lay on the Serb side of the Inter-Entity Boundary Line, which served as an international frontier during the early years of peace and made travel between the entities virtually impossible. The NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) was reluctant to intervene.

The UN understood the immense damage that had been done to its credibility. In 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a remarkably frank 155-page report on the massacre, which had occurred while he was head of the UN Peacekeeping department. The report accepted responsibility for the UN’s comprehensive failure and the problems of command and communication within the UN mission.

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