tragically Europe is no stranger to genocide from the harrying of the North in the 11th century in which up to 75% of the population of northern England was either killed or displaced to the Holocaust of the 20th century which up to 20 million minorities met their ends at the hands of the wicked Nazi Empire a small ever so slight Silver Lining to This Cloud most dark however is the fact that we are better than that nowadays never again and all that or well so we like to tell ourselves anyway because actually the Spectre of genocide continues to rear its Wicked head over European soil even in the modern day as exemplified by the Bosnian genocide which ravage Bosnia and Herz Goa in the 1990s it is a tragically unknown event in the modern zist and today we're going to do what we can to write that wrong by presenting you a primer on how it played out right from its early nent Beginnings to its brutal Zenith so let's begin and just a warning before we get started that this is a heavy one the BOS genocide occurred within the wider context of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the many wars that broke out among the former members of the Federation which included Serbia Bosnia Croatia Macedonia Montenegro and Slovenia tensions had always existed within multiethnic Yugoslavia but Joseph BRZ who ruled as president from 1953 to 1980 had managed to by and large keep a lid on those tensions particularly during the Autumn years of his rule but following his death later leaders such as Lazar KES I patar stolitz and RAF davitz completely failed to nurture any sense of Yugoslavian thus lacking any sense of collective identity it wasn't long until the people of Yugoslavia were identifying primarily with their ethnic identities something that naturally made a multiethnic federation such as Yugoslavia rather volatile to say the least and then just to pour petrol onto a well stacked bonfire ethnonationalist leaders who exploited these Visions to consolidate power began to rise with examples being sladan mosovich from Serbia frano tudman from Croatia and ravan kadic from the Serbian minority within Bosnia and I remember him in particular because he's going to become rather important in our story today figures such as these manipulated ethnic identities rewrote historical narratives and stoked fears of the other as they Consolidated power and as a result when Yugoslavia finally collapsed it wasn't exactly a clean breakup and armed conflict commenced almost immediately Under the Umbrella Monika of the Yugoslav wars which would rage from 1991 to 2001 within that expansive umbrella were old-fashioned Wars of Independence such as the Slovenian war of independence and Croatian war of independence which raged for 10 days in 1991 and between 1991 and 1995 respectively nothing too complicated here they wanted out Yugoslavia wanted to keep them and so War ensued with both prior examples winning their independence after their respective conflicts the were also insurgencies such as the 1999 to 2001 pevo Valley Insurgency in what is now Serbia and the 2001 Macedonian Insurgency these were caused by the fears of various minority groups who were for want of a better description Left Behind as Yugoslavia collapsed and feared for their safety in ethnically orientated states that wen't their own in both of these examples the minority in question were albanians a minority which hadn't got a nation of its own during the breakup and understandably didn't see or it should have to uptick and flee to Albania just for a basic guarantee of safety and prosperity and that brings us to the Bosnian War the war in which the foul events of the Bosnian genocide occurred it was one of the former such independence Wars and broke out following the 1992 Bosnian Independence referendum which returned a 99.71% result in the eye Direction and led to Bosnia and herzen formerly declaring independence on the 3rd of March 1992 Bosnian serbs however were Furious about this T of events and so they in turn immediately declared independence from the newly independent nation creating the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina under the leadership of ravan kizic they then immediately asked for Aid in securing their independence from what was left of the Yugoslav central government which was still dominated by serbs and well they were only too happy to oblige the war's exact star date is still contested but it's typically given as the 6th of April 1992 the day the Bosnia and herzen's Independence received International recognition and and as for the genocide that is typically agreed upon as starting the same day with massacres organized from both the top down and the bottom up beginning almost immediately the genocide itself was made up of a plethora of individual acts and instances of Serb perpetuated Bosnian targeted ethnic violence and as a result if we wish to get our heads around it we are better suited to jump around the story somewh so that you can get a general impression of the wicked violence that overtook Bosnia and Herzegovina during the genocide rather than worrying too much about a strict timeline of the violence as we otherwise might do in such a video so with that said let us begin with the maral massacres they were two separate mortar attacks launched against the marketplace at the center of SAR Evo's Old Town the market had no strategic value and no Bosnian military presence and instead was full of nothing but innocent civilians simply trying to get on with some semblance of a normal life as their country burnt around them Serbian forces were fully aware of those facts and nonetheless targeted the market it specifically to them it was simply a handy opportunity to quickly kill a large number of bosnians the first attack occurred on the 5th of February 1994 and consisted of a single 120 mm mortar rounds being fired at the market it landed dead on a heavily crowded Fruit Stand and as a result despite being only a single round the toll it wrought was nothing short of horrific it killed 68 people out right and wounded a further 144 all of whom were left with permanent life altering wounds the second attack occurred on the 28th of August 19 1995 and saw five mortar rounds launched on the marketplace mercifully despite the greater intensity of the barrage none of the rounds managed to strike a Target as crowded as in the first attack but they still killed 43 our right and wounded a further 75 Serbian forces vehemently denied responsibility for both attacks and even suggested that they were false flag attacks carried out by the Bosnian government in order to drum up sympathy for their cause in order to increase the odds of NATO entering the war on their side needless to say such claims have long since been debunked and proven to be complete nonsense there was also the Tulsa Massacre the atrocious event occurred on the 25th of May 1995 and saw the serbs set up a battery of 130 mm artillery guns outside the town of tula and proceed to hammer it with Relentless fire throughout the night their primary target was the Capia Square the Leisure quarter popular with the city's Youth and it once again had absolutely no strategic value or military presence and of course yet again the Serbian forces were perfectly aware of this 71 were killed 240 injured nearly all of whom were between the ages of 18 and 25 at the time of the attack Serbian forces claimed the attack was legitimate as a convoy of nearby evacuating troops were ambushed by Bosnian troops in violation of an agreed withdrawal and thus as far as they were concerned the town was a legitimate military Target the Ambush did indeed happen but their specific targeting of Civilian areas in response was deemed to be a nonsense response by International observers they were angry and they wanted to vent by slaughtering civilians and there was nothing more to it than that incidents such as those tragically represent the smaller end of the scale when it comes to attacks carried out against bosnians on the larger ends you have the horrific incidents such as the vrad massacres they occurred during mid 1992 and saw the entire town of vrad emptied of bosnians either through murder or deportation in what the United Nations international criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia called one of the most apprehensive and ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict it began on the 6th of April when Serbian forces occupied the town following several days of fighting in the local vicinity to formalize their control over the area the Serbian Municipality of vrad was then Incorporated which centered on the town after which the Serbian Army proper withdrew and control was handed to Serbian police and paramilitary forces the killing started immediately after the Handover with those aformentioned controlling forces taking their guns spanning out and shooting at anything Bosnian that moved they began by roaming the streets clearing them out as they roamed and then moved on to a house-to house search where they spanned the entire length of the Town kicked open every door they found and if bosnians happened to be on the other side of it they emptied their magazines and moved on the any pause in the shooting came when Serbian forces found a young woman because often they weren't killed and they instead were dragged off for Wicked reasons we're sure you really don't need us to go into details on WE stress the young part as well there was no lower limit on who could be tracked off many bosnians did attempt to flee when it became apparent what was going on barely any escaped those who died and tried to pack possessions were found and shot before they left their homes and those who took unfortunate turns as they fled were shot before they could escape the town the exact number of survivors is unclear but we're talking about a couple hundred Max when the aacar finally ended in August 1992 the town which used to be 63% Bosnian and 33% Serbian was now 100% Serbian events such as these give you a general feel for how the Bosnian genocide played out brutal War was waged between the bosnians and the serbians and while that played out massacres of all kinds were committed against the bosnians from small scale ones such as at tuler and Saro to larger scale systematic ethnic cleansing such as at vrad so now that we have a general understanding of how the genocide played out let's now bring this chapter to a close and move on to deepen our understanding by zooming in further still and having a look at a single massacre in depth the single worst one of the entire genocide at least by numbers the shanit massacre 1992 as the war raged on tens of thousands of bosnians fled to the relative safety of shanit the midside Town faced unrelenting assault by Serbian forces but the bosnians were holding at least for now and so the town with its reasonable infrastructure and connections to Aid networks seemed like a sensible place to find Refuge at least compared to remaining in outlying settlements where at any time Serbian forces could sweep through and just Massacre everyone eventually however as the Serbian assault eventually remolded into a full-blown Siege the situation in the town began to deteriorate the now 60,000 people crammed inside many of whom were forced to find shelter in stairwells corridors bus shelters anything that offered some semblance of cover from the elements were now all but cut off from the outside world Aid packages which now had to go through the serbians were more often than not stolen for their own use in response to what was gearing up to be a humanitarian disaster the UN Security Council declared the town a safe area and negotiated a unilateral ceasefire in April 1993 a small contingent of 600 lightly armed Dutch troops were dispatched to enforce this and a humanitarian Corridor was opened out of sanit to allow the evacuation of the wounded and the delivery of desperately needed supplies this was by no means ideal to be sure but the situation was at least stable the people inside could survive the situation persevered for 23 months until ravan kizic fueled partly by rabid racial rage and the realization that the 600 lightly armed Dutch soldiers station there were in real terms powerless to stop him snapped and he issued directive 7 which ordered the Drina Corp of his army to quote by plans and wellth thought out combat operations create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for inhabitants of sanitzer set operations began on the 12th of July 1995 they quickly took control of potari outlying Village to the north of sanet and then they immediately began separating male and female inhabitants of the village the women were loaded onto buses and transported further back into Serbian held territory as for the men they were rounded up in a building in potari known locally as the White House the personal belongings were torn with them piled up outside and torched you won't be needing them anymore the brave few who dared to ask questions were told the following day sanitzer itself fell and the separation of men and women continued when no one else in the town could be found 15,000 of the men and boys in their custody were formed into a lengthly column 10 km long and marched off in the direction of Tulsa as for those who remains they began to be loaded up onto buses and driven North to Braton a large town a few kilometers north of shitza they were given no food or water and those who expressed their distress over this fact were beaten mercilessly and then when people began arriving in Braton apps on ass The Killing started the majority of the detained were being held at the local high school no food was provided and occasionally a bucket of dirty old rainwater was hurled into the rooms packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people those who needed to use a bathroom were among the first to die they were only allowed to go if escorted by Serbian soldiers and those soldiers disgusted by the task beat them with the butts of their rifles the entire way and several were also shot in fits of rage on the part of their captors their corpses then simply being kicked to the side of the hallway to get them out of the way way from there The Killing only escalated as sporadic Bosnian prisoners began to be dragged out of the school and shot for the slightest of imagined infractions against their captors about 50 were killed in these spontaneous ways before the intentional Mass killing began which wouldn't take long on the afternoon of the 13th of July prisoners began to be transferred to kevitz Warehouse a small one-story building not too far away either by bus or being forced to March there on foot come 5:00 p.m. the warehouse was rammed so tightly that many had already suffocated to death and then the shooting started Serbian forces had surrounded the warehouse and they all opened up in unison dumping magazine after magazine and belt after belt into every door and window that the warehouse had pausing only to give the soldiers the safety needed to approach a window and throw in a grenade or dump a magazine more closely the shooting quietened come knle at which point over a thousand innocent Bosnian men had been killed but tragically this was just the start the following day prisoners began to be loaded up onto buses and taken to the school in orav arts another Village in the surrounding area when it was full later that day men and boys were blindfolded taken from the school by the truck fall driven 800 M down the road to a nearby Meadow where they were then unloaded from the trucks and shot without hesitation this continued for a little over 2 hours at which point at least 839 men and boys had been killed their bodies left where they fell in the meadow Elsewhere on the 14th other prisoners began to be taken to the school in petkovski which was once again filled until it was crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in this instance the Serbian soldiers chose to add greater humiliation to their barbaric routine forcing unloaded prisoners to sing patriotic Serbian songs as they were pushed into the school and then went inside a Serbian officer took to the stage that used to be for wholesome School assemblies and had them repeating chorus this is Serbian land and will always remain so over and over again all the while sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard as prisoners were occasionally dragged outside and shot come dusk with officer leading the forced corus getting bored those prisoners who had survived until that point were then slowly busted down the road to petkovski Dam where they were immediately shot at least 8815 men and boys were killed during this ordeal with only two being known to have survived the following day voin papovich chief of security of the Drina Corp arrived on site to see how the execution of directive 7 was coming along and he ordered that a new approach be taken now the prisoners were to dig their own Graves to expedite the cover up make no mistake however Popovich was a demon the likes of which have barely trampled European dirt before and so his want to see bodies expediently covered was not the result of some lingering shred of humanity that tugged away at the furthest reaches of his psyche and reminded him that what he was doing was wrong oh no he was just a pragmatist and was well aware that with the whole world taking bosnia's side in the war his team likely wasn't going to emerge Victorious and thus he wanted to ensure that evidence was properly buried as as much as possible as quickly as possible rather than just being left out in the Meadows and warehouses to be easily found true to his order that was exactly what was done for the next Mass killing as that afternoon some prisoners were taken to the site adjacent to the Drina River and after digging an enormous Hole by hands they were subsequently pushed into that hole and shot their remains were then covered with more victims who were transported out on trucks tipped into the hole and then shot while clamoring over the remains of the last victims all in all a further eight 109 victims met their end in that hole two more further mass killings were then carried out before the massacre came to an end another on the 16th in which around 1200 people were killed at the brano military farm and another at pelit Cultural Center in which around 500 were killed all that was to be done then was to sweep the area for survivors of which the Serbian forces found four at balakov two near snagov 39 in bisho and six around trovo by the 31st of July all of those found were killed no exceptions some killed while Bound by rope some were blindfolded and some were humiliated on film for the solders enjoyment before meeting their end and with that the massacre was over we ultimately have no idea how many were murdered for certain and even the figures we presented in this video should be taken as provisional because new exhumations constantly reveal the remains of new victims who previously went undocumented and so the tragic tally ticks ever upwards as things stand however at the time of recording the number of known victims rests at 8 8,372 the genocide was only stopped by the end of the Bosnian War itself which was brought to an end by the signing of the Daton agreement on the 14th of December 1995 an agreement that saw the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina abandon its claims to Independence its forces lay down its arms and its allies from Serbia proper Yugoslavia having fully disintegrated in 1992 withdrawing their forces back across the border as for the final death toll for much of the same reasons we can't fully commit to a number right now but at the time of recording the provisional figure stands at 33071 mercifully extensive efforts have at least been made to bring the perpetrators to Justice with the UN founding the international criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia exclusively for that very reason that's all ravan kadic Beed a 40-year sentence in 2016 vardin Popovich received life imprisonment in 2010 and Novak duic the lead perpetrator of the tools of Massacre get 25 years in 2009 not that any length of time Behind Bars can ever truly heal the wounds that their actions created such Wicked violence can never be allowed to happen again and we can only hope that for once when Europeans All Join hands and declare never again that this time we actually mean it