When it comes to the horrors of genocide we say these words with an ironic frequency. How do we short-circuit the re-run of this pitiful, shameful cycle?
Today will be a hard day for Sydneysider Mirela Muratovic, a survivor of the only recognised genocide in Europe since the end of the second world war: Srebrenica.
During the 1990s Bosnian war Srebrenica was designated a United Nations-protected “safe area” – a label that came to mean nothing.
Thirty years ago, in the days after 11 July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were rounded up and killed. Mirela was five years old at the time. Her dad, Munib, was one of those victims.
If that wasn’t enough for such a young mind to deal with, it came just two years after her mother, Dzeva, failed to return home after leaving to find food with her cousins, presumed kidnapped and killed. A peace of sorts came as a result of Australia accepting Mirela and her remaining family members as refugees in 2002.
