Legacy

Surviving
One of the hardest legacies for survivors is not knowing what happened to loved ones. This was made even more difficult in Srebrenica, where, after the genocide ended, Bosnian Serb officials dug up the mass graves of their victims and reburied the bodies across a wide swath of territory in an effort to conceal their crimes.

International and national authorities have attempted to discover what happened to as many as 30,000 people listed as missing throughout Bosnia. In the decade following the conflict, they have identified over half the bodies, including several thousand from Srebrenica.

Rebuilding
The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended in 1995 with a peace agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio. It established two state "entities" the Serb Republic and the Bosnian Federation joined by a weak central government. Srebrenica is in the Serb Republic.

Refugees were guaranteed the right to return to their homes, but only a fraction of the prewar Bosniak population has gone back to Srebrenica.

Shifting Violence
In 1999, the Serbian regime that had supported separatist Bosnian Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia launched an offensive targeting ethnic Albanian civilians in Serbia's southern region of Kosovo. Government forces killed 10,000 Albanians and forcibly displaced 800,000. NATO responded with an 11-week bombing campaign.

The conflict ended with Kosovo effectively under international control. Approximately 200,000 of Kosovo's minority Serbian population, isolated and vulnerable to revenge attacks by Kosovar Albanians, fled the region.

In January 2008, Kosovar Albanian leaders declared their independence but have gained only partial international recognition.

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