The Forgotten Widows Of Srebrenica

On 11 July 1995, General Ratko Mladić's Serbian forces swept into the supposed UN safe haven of Srebrenica, forcibly separating approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys aged seven and upwards from their families. Under the helpless gaze of Dutch peacekeepers, the males were loaded onto buses and lorries. None would survive what became known as Europe's worst genocide since the Holocaust.

The massacre marked the darkest chapter of the Balkan conflicts that tore Yugoslavia apart between 1991 and 2001. As the federal republic disintegrated, multiple factions engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing, but the fall of Srebrenica remains the most notorious single incident of the wars.

By September 1995, satellite imagery had exposed the existence of mass burial sites scattered across the region. In a desperate attempt to conceal evidence, Serbian militias deployed bulldozers to exhume bodies and redistribute them amongst numerous graves stretching from Belgrade to Lukavica, near Sarajevo. In the most heartbreaking cases, remains were moved up to four times, leaving some burial sites containing nothing more than scattered bones.

The grim arithmetic of genocide has left mothers, wives and daughters with an impossible task: piecing together their loved ones from fragments scattered across hundreds of sites. Each bone recovered represents both hope and heartbreak—a step closer to providing dignity in death for those denied it in life.

Photojournalist Marleen Daniëls has documented these women's relentless search, capturing a story of loss that continues to unfold three decades after the world promised such horrors would never happen again.

Photo: © Marleen Daniëls