THERE ARE MOMENTS in life that change you forever.
Moments that don’t just shift your perspective, but tear through everything you thought you knew, about the world, about justice, and about humanity. Moments that shape your soul.
The 11th of July, 1995, was one such moment for me.
This was a time before smartphones, before livestreams, before social media could broadcast atrocities in real-time. Back then, genocide didn’t trend. It hid in the shadows, unfilmed, unseen, and, to many, unreal.
But in Bosnia, it was all too real.
From 1992, Serbian forces unleashed a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Muslims of Bosnia. The figures are staggering: around 80,000 killed, some estimates say even more. 60,000 women and girls raped. Over 1.5 million people displaced. 1,500 mosques destroyed, many of them centuries old.
This was Europe’s first genocide since the Holocaust.
The stories are harrowing.
Kenan Trebincevic was just 11 when the war began. He remembers his beloved karate coach, a Serb named Pero, someone he looked up to, arriving at his home with an AK-47, shouting: “You have one hour to leave or be killed!”
He said: “I never imagined that our Christian Serb neighbours, people we shared birthdays and holidays with, would throw us into camps, murder and rape us, just because we were Muslim. Our only crime was believing in Allah.”
Another survivor recounted how a mother, pleading for her child’s life, had her hand severed before watching her son’s throat slit in front of her.
But the darkest chapter came on July 11th, in the town of Srebrenica.
Declared a UN “safe zone” in 1993, Srebrenica was supposed to be protected. Dutch peacekeepers were stationed there to guard the civilians. Instead, they handed them over to General Ratko Mladić and the Serb forces.
What followed was a slaughter.
8,372 men and boys were executed. Thousands of women and girls were raped. It wasn’t just a massacre, it was a methodical extermination.
What was their crime? That they said: “Our Lord is Allah.”
وَمَا نَقَمُوا مِنْهُمْ إِلَّا أَن يُؤْمِنُوا بِاللَّهِ الْعَزِيزِ الْحَمِيد
And they resented them not except because they believed in Allah, the Exalted in Might, the Praiseworthy. (al-Buruj 8)
I was only 20 then. It was the first time I truly understood the horrors of war. The first time I saw how cheaply Muslim life was valued. The first time I understood Europe’s deep-seated hatred of Muslims. The first time I realised the Ummah had no shield to protect it.
To this day, Srebrenica is an open wound in the Muslim psyche.
Visit the cemetery in Potočari and you’ll see an ocean of white headstones, row upon row marking the graves of fathers, sons, brothers. The women still mourn. The few elderly men who survived carry the grief of an entire generation wiped out.
Mass graves were dug. Bodies buried and reburied, bones scattered to cover the crime. Since 1996, forensic scientists have painstakingly identified remains through DNA, giving families some closure, a fragment of dignity in a world that offered them none.
They say: “Never again.”
But what has changed in 30 years?
We now know that Western powers blocked the Bosniaks from defending themselves. Clinton admitted NATO allies believed a Muslim Bosnia was “unnatural.” The British, French, and Russians insisted on an arms embargo, effectively ensuring Muslim defeat. France’s Mitterrand said Bosnia didn’t belong in Europe. A British diplomat called it “a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe.”
The same hatred and hypocrisy echo today in Gaza.
Western leaders call themselves peacemakers. Trump dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize. But in reality:
وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمْ لَا تُفْسِدُوا۟ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ قَالُوٓا۟ إِنَّمَا نَحْنُ مُصْلِحُونَ
أَلَآ إِنَّهُمْ هُمُ ٱلْمُفْسِدُونَ وَلَـٰكِن لَّا يَشْعُرُونَ
When they are told, ‘Do not spread corruption on the earth,’ they say: ‘We are only reformers.’ Verily, they are the ones who spread corruption, but they do not realise. (al-Baqarah 11–12)
The Muslim rulers did nothing during the Bosnian genocide. They do nothing now, not in Palestine, not in East Turkestan, not in Kashmir, Myanmar, or Sudan. Not just silent but aiding and abetting in the face of oppression. Complicit in our suffering.
The UN and international institutions? Empty words. Hollow condemnations. Even the ICJ, despite global hope, has failed to halt the killing. The ICC issues arrest warrants while the perpetrators sip coffee in Western capitals.
And when America says it “intervened” in Bosnia, remember: they came only after the killing was done. The Serbs were rewarded with land after the genocide, and the victims were denied a return.
Sound familiar? It’s the same colonial playbook used in Palestine since the Nakba.
So have we learned nothing in three decades?
Gaza has exposed, yet again, the international order for what it truly is: not a force for peace, but a system built to keep Muslim lands weak, divided, and subjugated. They kill us, displace us, rape our women, burn our homes, and then wear suits and speak of “human rights.”
Our hope does not lie with them.
Our only hope lies in Allah, His Deen, and this Ummah.
The Prophet ﷺ said: “Only the Imam (Khalifah) is a shield, behind whom the Muslims fight and by whom they are protected.” (Muslim)
For far too long, this Ummah has been without its shield. Until we restore it, through unity, through courage, through sincere leadership, our wounds will keep bleeding.
Srebrenica was not just a tragedy. It was a wake-up call for my generation. Sadly, some just hit snooze afterwards. With Gaza, let us not do so again.
