Dutch peacekeepers stood aside as Bosnian Serb forces seized the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, setting off Europe's worst atrocity since World War II. Over the following days, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered, an act later ruled genocide by international tribunals.
Srebrenica had been declared a UN 'safe area' in 1993, a haven for Bosnian Muslim civilians in the midst of the Bosnian War, protected—at least in theory—by a garrison of lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers. By July 1995, the enclave was swollen with refugees, starving, and surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladić, who had grown convinced the UN would not intervene to stop him.
On July 11, Mladić's forces walked into the town virtually unopposed. Dutch troops, outnumbered and denied requested NATO air support until too late, could do nothing but watch as Serb forces separated men and boys from women and young children. Mladić was filmed that day handing out chocolate to children, promising safety, even as the machinery of mass killing was already underway.
Over the following week, Bosnian Serb units executed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys, burying many in mass graves later exhumed by forensic teams using DNA analysis to identify the dead, a process that continues to this day. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice both ruled the killings constituted genocide. Mladić was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2017, more than two decades after ordering an atrocity that has come to define the failure of international intervention in the 1990s Balkans.