Thousands of mourners, survivors, foreign dignitaries and religious leaders gathered at the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Centre in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina on Saturday to mark the 31st anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. The commemoration centred on a mass burial of ten newly identified victims, the youngest of whom was 20 years old when he was killed. More than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in the days following July 11, 1995, after those forces overran the town of Srebrenica, which the United Nations Security Council had declared a protected "safe area" two years earlier. The massacre is widely recognised as the worst atrocity committed in Europe since the Holocaust.

The ten victims buried on Saturday were aged between 20 and 56 at the time of their deaths and were identified over the past year as forensic investigators continue to excavate mass graves in the surrounding region. Among them was Senad Jusic, whose sister-in-law Zirafeta Jusic told reporters she had promised the victims' mother before her death in 2002 that he would one day be buried beside his brother Dzemail, whose remains had been recovered years earlier. She recounted the harrowing circumstances of Senad's final moments: a relative who survived the attempt by Bosniaks to flee to safe territory said he was killed in hand-to-hand combat in an ambush near Kamenica Hill. More than a thousand victims are still missing, and every year on July 11 the newly identified are buried at the Memorial Centre as the search continues. Courts have so far convicted 54 individuals, sentencing them to a combined 781 years in prison plus five life sentences for genocide, crimes against humanity, and related offences.

Speakers at the commemoration stressed that remembrance carries active responsibility. Denis Bečirović, Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that preserving the truth about the past was essential to any viable future. Kada Hotić, of the Association of Mothers of the Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves, called on perpetrators to acknowledge their crimes, saying that admission and forgiveness remained the only path to healing. The Dutch ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Henk van den Dool, underscored the role of education — a resonant message given that Dutch UN peacekeepers were present in Srebrenica when the safe zone fell. In The Hague, the city where the former Yugoslavia tribunal once sat, hundreds gathered at a separate ceremony on the Lange Voorhout square, where the mayor placed a 31st stone at a temporary memorial site — one stone for each year since the genocide.

The anniversary also prompted broader international reflection. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described the massacre as "a crime against humanity," and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, writing after a visit to Srebrenica, called on people everywhere to commit to "fighting violence and dehumanisation wherever we encounter it." Campaigners and human rights advocates drew comparisons between Srebrenica and ongoing conflicts, with former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth noting that while leaders of the Srebrenica genocide were convicted, perpetrators of what he described as Israel's genocide in Gaza remain at large — a parallel that several activists raised publicly around the anniversary. The commemoration took place against the backdrop of the Bosnian War of 1992–1995, in which more than 100,000 people were killed following the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the series of ethnic conflicts that tore the Balkans apart.