Srebrenica – Potočari memorial site
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The memorial for what is known as the Srebrenica massacre, or even Srebrenica genocide, committed in July 1995 by Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There is a cemetery, where some 7000 victims of the atrocities are buried, and continue to be buried once identified … which is an ongoing process. In addition there is a Memorial Hall and a museum in the nearby former car-battery factory, which at the time had become a base for Dutch UN troops, where many of the victims had tried to seek refuge. Srebrenica stands for the worst genocidal atrocities committed in Europe since the Holocaust. Here the "never again" pledged after WWII was truly nullified. Given the significance of the events of 1995 and because it was comparatively recent, visiting the site is heavy-duty dark tourism, also in view of the remoteness of the site.
More background info: For more general context see under Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Srebrenica is the agreed cover term for a series of massacres and "ethnic cleansing" committed by the Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić, in the latter stages of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovia in July 1995.
More narrowly, Srebrenica is the name of a town/municipality that was a Bosnian Muslim enclave within the Bosnian Serb Republika Srpska in the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina not far from the border with Serbia. It had become a target for Bosnian Serbs early on in the conflict of the 1990s and had basically been under siege since 1992. UNHCR aid deliveries were were barely getting through. The massacres of July 1995 were then the final culmination of the Bosnian Serbs’ efforts at “ethnic cleansing” of the region – a strategy that was instigated by Radovan Karadžić, then president of Republika Srpska, and that had the support of the Serbian Yugoslav government in Belgrade under Slobodan Milošević (who had long been dreaming of a “Greater Serbia”).
By mid 1995, the situation within Srebrenica had become critical, people were beginning to die of starvation. And that’s despite the fact that the UN forces in Bosnia had declared Srebrenica a “safe area”. As Bosnian Serb forces were closing in, the remaining people of Srebrenica fled, mostly to the UN base at Potočari just north of Srebrenica, where they hoped to find protection. The Dutch UN battalion stationed there became overwhelmed by the developments. Hundreds of refugees camped inside the compound, many more (ca. 20,000-25,000) were forced to stay outside in the open (in the sweltering summer heat). Calls for NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serb army advancing on Srebrenica made by the Dutch commander at Potočari were declined.
The situation deteriorated further and on 11 July Bosnian Serb forces took over the by now empty town of Srebrenica. There’s video footage showing General Ratko Mladić parading triumphantly through the streets of Srebrenica claiming that it was time to “take revenge” on the “Turks” (meaning the Muslims) and reclaim the place for the Serbs. He then ordered his troops to move on to Potočari, which they did the next day.
There the Dutch UN commander tried to negotiate with Mladić, who claimed that the Bosnian Muslims would be safe and transported to Bosniak-held territory – possibly in exchange for Bosnian Serb POWs. But it was all just a front. Things began getting suspicious when the Bosnian Serbs started separating the women and children from men “of military age”, though many were as young as 14 and others well over 65. The women and children were then herded on to buses and carted away. Before that there had already been atrocities committed at the site, including rape and random executions, especially at a building just outside the UN compound referred to as the “White House”. The refugees who had hoped for safety within the UN compound were told to leave too – the women and children were deported, the men held back – and later murdered.
By the way, the award-winning feature film “Quo Vadis, Aida?” made in 2020, gives a good impression of what the situation and developments of July 1995 were like at Potočari. The film uses a bit of artistic licence, but overall makes for good preparatory viewing before actually visiting the place. Recommended.
The Dutch UN forces were ultimately unable to prevent or stop the atrocities, being under-equipped, understaffed and unprepared for the task. Some of these Dutch soldiers are also still deeply traumatized from the events at Srebrenica to this day too.
But there’s also much criticism of their failure to protect the people of Srebrenica. It’s not simply the fault of the Dutch, but more generally also a failure of the UN and the international community.
Meanwhile, more Bosniak men from Srebrenica and the surrounding area decided to take their chances by forming a column and attempting to march through the woods and mountains towards Bosniak-held Tuzla to the north-west (ca. 60 miles/100 km away). Over the next few days, the majority of these men were ambushed by Bosnian Serb troops, some using appropriated UN vehicles to lure their victims into a false sense of security. Others forced captured Bosniaks to call out to their associates still hiding in the forested hills, telling them to come down to where they would be “safe with the Serbs”. There’s video footage of one such incident.
Many years later a video made it into the public domain that showed Bosnian Serbs of the “Scorpions” paramilitary organization, who had filmed themselves, actually committing a massacre of captured young Bosniak men (teenagers, basically), after taunting and humiliating them. It makes for very uncomfortable viewing (see below).
In the end only a relatively small proportion of the men made it to Tuzla. The rest were systematically massacred by the Bosnian Serbs. Hence the column’s walk was later dubbed the “March of Death”.
The victims of the many massacres usually had their hands tied behind their backs with wire, often they were blindfolded too. The locations selected for the mass executions were often disused community centres, schools or agricultural buildings. Afterwards the bodies were buried in mass graves (apparently some victims were even buried still alive). In total, over 8300 male Bosniaks were thus slaughtered – and up to 30,000 (mostly women and children) were displaced.
In attempts to cover up these war crimes as the Dayton Peace Accords loomed, the mass graves were later exhumed by the Bosnian Serbs and the bodies transferred to secondary or even tertiary graves in more remote locations. In the process entangled bodies became dismembered so that body parts of the same person could end up in as many as four or five separate locations. All this later made their forensic identification extremely difficult.
Since the victims were targeted solely on the grounds of their Bosniak ethnicity, the atrocities are regarded as an act of genocide – such was also the verdict by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) based in The Hague, the Netherlands. The application of the term 'genocide' is contested (as you would expect especially by Serb nationalists), as not an entire people but only adult men "of military age" were killed … although that included boys of just 14 years of age.
But since the goal of the atrocities was to remove all of the Muslim population from the Srebrenica area, the use of the term 'genocide' can be justified, even though the scale of the events was a fraction of the other significant genocides of the 20th century (especially Cambodia, Rwanda and of course the Holocaust). But such squabbling over figures and terminology will be pretty meaningless to the widows, mothers and other relatives of the disappeared …
Incidentally, the expression “ethnic cleansing” is the literal translation into English of the same phrase in Serbo-Croat (“etničko čišćenje”), which was invented precisely to avoid the term genocide. But in a way it is actually an even worse expression – because the “cleansing” part implies that the “wrong” ethnicity was equivalent to being “dirt” that had to be removed. Still, the term has stuck and has become a nasty but common term in the vocabulary of dark history that has been applied in many other cases ever since.
Of the over 8000 dead, about four fifth have by now been identified and buried at Potočari. The identification process (mostly through DNA analysis) is a complicated issue, exacerbated by the fact that bodies were often exhumed and reburied often using heavy machinery such as excavators. In some cases whole families were wiped out so that there are no living relatives left to provide blood samples for DNA identification. So some of the bodies found will probably remain unidentifiable for ever.
The decision to turn Potočari into a memorial was taken in the year 2000, a first ceremony was held there in 2002 and the first ca. 600 burials of victims took place in early 2003. Later that year the memorial site was formally dedicated in the presence of Bill Clinton, who had been president of the USA at the time of the Srebrenica atrocities (and who brokered the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war).
The top men responsible for the Srebrenica genocide were Republika Srpska’s then president Radovan Karadžić, who initiated the policy of “ethnic cleansing”, and of course General Ratko Mladić, the military commander of the Bosnian Serb army at Srebrenica. Both were indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity by the ICTY, along with scores of other participants in the atrocities of lower ranks. Also indicted was former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, who was arrested and extradited to The Hague in the year 2000. But he died of natural causes in March 2006 before a verdict could be proclaimed.
Karadžić and Mladić remained at large for many years despite a sum of five million USD bounty having been put on their heads. Karadžić lived under a false name in Belgrade practising “alternative medicine” and psychology in a weird disguise including a big white beard tied in a knot at the bottom (see photos 38 and 39 in the gallery for the Belgrade chapter). He was arrested in 2008 and put before the ICTY. Mladić remained on the run even longer, probably protected by an old-boy network from the war years, but was finally betrayed and arrested in May 2011 and his trial at the ICTY began in 2012. Allegedly his handover was given as a precondition for Serbia being granted candidate status for EU membership. Both men were eventually convicted of several counts of crimes against humanity and of genocide and given life sentences. As my guide on the Srebrenica tour I went on in April 2025 (see below) said “I wish them a long life in prison”.
I have visited Srebrenica/Potočari twice, first in the summer of 2009, when I had arranged a driver to take me from my Sarajevo hotel to the site, and while at Potočari we were lucky to be able to tag on to a large group of Turkish visitors, so we could also see the Memorial Hall and watch the introductory film. This film can now also be viewed at the Srebrenica “Gallery 11/07/95” in Sarajevo.
For my return visit in April 2025 I had booked a proper guided tour from Sarajevo (see details below), which was with a small group of eight participants from six different countries. So this top dark attraction clearly has some international appeal. A particularly large subsection of visitors appear to be Turkish – and part of the memorial site has been put together by a Turkish organization. The fact that the victims of Srebrenica were overwhelmingly Muslims will have played a role here. Other sections have been made in collaboration with the Westerbork memorial – obviously, here it is the Dutch connection that will have facilitated this co-operation. The Imperial War Museum in London has also been named as a model for parts of the memorial.
The exhibitions in the administrative block must have been completed sometime in 2016, as one panel says the verdict on Mladić was “expected” for 2017. The Memorial Hall was redesigned to its current state around the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, so from in 2020. When exactly it was completed I don’t know. But it certainly feels very recent.
What there is to see: First of all: the Srebrenica Memorial Centre is not in Srebrenica itself but in Potočari a few miles to the north of the town. This is where the former car-battery factory is located that served as the base for the Dutch UN battalion. The ex-industrial complex is now home to a Memorial Hall, while the adjacent administrative block of the compound houses a comprehensive exhibition providing details of the genocide, the world’s reaction and the aftermath. Across the road from the memorial centre is the actual cemetery where the victims are buried.
Compared to my first visit in 2009, the memorial centre has been vastly expanded. Back then there was just a comparatively small collection of photos and artefacts in the Memorial Hall and a screen for showing a 25-minute film about Srebrenica. The current exhibits in the Memorial Hall and the entire topical exhibition in the administrative block have been developed since.
A visit today typically begins with the screening of an intro film, yet when I was there with a small group of eight, we had to wait until a very large group of school pupils (at least two whole classes, possibly more) had finished their viewing. The film is no longer the same as what I had seen in 2009. It still has some of the same scenes, including General Ratko Mladić parading through the empty Srebrenica (see above), but is cut differently. It now also includes scenes from the film footage showing an actual execution of a group of young Bosniak men (see above). Be forewarned: it’s graphic. The memorial staff can set the language of the subtitles to different languages, in our case it was English.
After the film, we were accompanied by a local English-speaking guide to the Memorial Hall in the darkened former factory building. He took us to a few of the panels in the front part of the hall, especially to a large one with a map that detailed the “March of Death” of men towards Tuzla and the various ambush points (see above). At the end he lamented the fact that thanks to the Dayton Accords, Bosniaks, including relatives of the genocide victims, still had to live next to Bosnian Serbs, including actual perpetrators. He likened that to a post-WWII Germany given in part to the Nazis to continue their path. That was of course not acceptable then, but for Bosnia now a similar situation apparently is. The comparison to Nazi Germany is perhaps a bit too strong a simile, but you can see the grievance with the status quo of Bosnia.
After the short guided tour we were free to explore the rest of the Memorial Hall and the museum. The centrepiece of the Memorial Hall is a large installation consisting of several dozen old shoes on glass plates suspended above the floor so that each shoe is echoed by its shadow on the concrete below. These shoes are obviously supposed to stand symbolically for those who attempted the long walk to Tuzla and did not make it.
Around the shoe installation stand various panels with more info (in Bosnian and English) about the “March of Death” and the ambushes by Bosnian Serbs, and some display cabinets have exhibits such as personal belongings, items of food and drink, and clothing – including a shirt of one of the survivors who did reach Tuzla, and you can see a photo of him wearing that very same shirt on the march.
The rest of the accessible part of the industrial building is mostly empty, except for some remnants of old machinery. In the main corridor you can spot some graffiti, apparently left by the Dutch UN soldiers.
Back in the administrative building, the museum exhibitions incorporate more of such graffiti, some of a rather dubious nature. As a panel points out, though, some of these graffiti may have been tampered with, so not all of them may be 100% authentic.
The exhibitions have several strands, one being a very detailed chronological account of what happened in Srebrenica and Potočari between 1992 and 1995. Another focus is on international reactions and the road to the Dayton Accords, yet another is on the subsequent efforts involved in investigating the massacres and bringing the perpetrators to justice. These sections were prepared in co-operation with Westerbork, hence there are several points with a special Dutch perspective and focus on the Netherlands, also due to the role those Dutch UN troops played and what consequences their failure to prevent the genocide had in their home country (that included the resignation of a government). In addition there’s also a section covering personal stories of survivors and those affected by the tragedy of Srebrenica. The latter is apparently a work in progress.
The exhibitions here consist mainly of text-and-photo panels, in Bosnian with mostly decent English translations (a few flaws aside). These are interspersed with video/audio stations where you can also choose between a Bosnian (= Serbo-Croat) or an English soundtrack.
For the most part there are no artefacts on display, except in the parts where the UN operations room and other rooms used by the Dutch have been preserved/reconstructed. Here you can see some of their equipment, such as communications gear, helmets, field beds and uniforms.
The tour I was on (see also below) did not allow anywhere near enough time for going through everything in the administrative block – so I just dashed through the rooms taking photos of the panels to read at home later. Given the sheer amount of detailed text and lots of video material it would have been hard to process it all there and then anyway. You’d need not only time but also immense stamina.
Outside the buildings, take note of the big block of concrete marked “UN”. This is where the separation of the men from the women and children took place. Diagonally across the road stands another, smaller building (informally referred to as the “White House”). This is where the Bosnian Serbs executed several of the Bosniak refugees from Srebrenica (see above).
On the other side of the road that leads past the Potočari compound lies a large area that in the early 2000s was declared the cemetery for the victims, once identified by forensic investigations, to be buried here (even if only in part due to still missing body parts). When I first visited back in 2009, there were still some empty areas, and there were numerous fresh graves with temporary green wooden markers. Bit by bit these were being replaced by the proper white marble gravestones of a uniform design that characterize the majority of the cemetery’s area space.
Look out for the groups of graves with the same surname – sometimes three generations of males from the same family. Also keep an eye out for the young victims with year of birth such as 1980. The year of death is, of course, the same for all of the men and boys buried here.
In the centre of the complex a large memorial monument with victims' names forms a semicircle – one section is still empty, holding space for more names of identified victims. This memorial monument partly surrounds a kind of open-air mosque, the central memorial space used during burial and anniversary ceremonies. Several memorial stones and a modern turbe (a stylized Muslim mausoleum/tomb) complement the ensemble. One of the memorial stones lists known place names where massacres occurred and also gives a total number of victims: “8372 ...”. I wonder, however, how such an exact number could be arrived at, given the degree of uncertainty surrounding the mass graves and the difficulties encountered in conducting forensic examinations.
To the right of the main entrance to the cemetery there is a small nondescript building in whose subterranean exhibition room a small but very moving selection of photos (blown up to large scale) is on display. You can also see these large black-and-white images at the Srebrenica 11/07/95 Gallery in Sarajevo. The image that gripped me most was that of a half-decomposed hand of an exhumed victim held in the rubber-gloved hand of a forensic examiner – it almost looked like they were really "holding hands". Very eerie.
Across the road from the car park is a small souvenir stall selling books, brochures and T-Shirts. I even saw one visitor wearing a Srebrenica T-Shirt while walking through the cemetery.
Our group tour also included a lunch prepared by a local woman in her home (and luckily for me it was 90% vegetarian) in between visiting the memorial centre and the cemetery. Before we returned to the cemetery site we also had a short drive through the actual town of Srebrenica itself, but without stopping anywhere. Out of the windows we could see some abandoned houses in between repaired ones, indicative of the fact that the place has far fewer inhabitants now than it originally had until 1995. You can also see reconstructed mosques (that were destroyed during the war in the 1990s). But there is nothing specific for a dark tourist to focus on here – that’s all in Potočari.
All in all, a visit to Srebrenica/Potočari is certainly one of the grimmest dark-tourism experiences to be had in the Balkans. Recommended, but make no mistake: this is not for the faint of heart. It can be too harrowing for some. Yet it provides an extremely valuable history lesson.
Location: Srebrenica is about 50 miles (80 km) north-east of Bosnia and Herzegovina's capital city Sarajevo (and just five miles or so from the border with Serbia). That's as the crow flies – on the road it's more than twice that, thanks to the winding roads and hairpin mountain passes. The Potočari memorial site is not actually in Srebrenica, but ca. four miles (6 km) north of the town on the 453 road to Bratunac.
Google Maps locators:
Memorial Centre: [44.1552, 19.3026]
Cemetery/memorial: [44.1583, 19.3014]
Srebrenica town: [44.1033, 19.2983]
Access and costs: remote and can be either complicated or costly.
Details: Srebrenica is about two to three hours' drive from Sarajevo. You could drive your own car or hire one, but navigation in these parts isn't the easiest. Signposting is scant and mostly in Serbian Cyrillic only, so you'd need to be able to read that script or you're bound to get lost. GPS/SatNav is not necessarily reliable in these parts either. As we were getting close to the border with Serbia, my system switched to that country’s network and I lost my eSIM connection for Bosnia. So at least make sure to download an offline map before relying on satellite navigation!
To make things easier you could hire a car with driver. That's what I had to opt for when I visited in August 2009 as I had forgotten to take my driving licence on that trip to Bosnia then. It roughly doubled the cost (to 110 EUR) but I was glad I did it, because I'm sure I would have had a very hard time navigating the route. Plus the driver doubled up as a guide/interpreter at the site, which was a valuable bonus.
For my return trip in April 2025 my choice was to invest into an organized tour. That took all the logistics out of the equation and we had a very knowledgeable and experienced driver-guide. It was a group tour by minivan with eight participants and the per person price was 68 EUR (including a locally prepared lunch). This was with the operator “Funky Tours” based in Sarajevo, who I also used for a range of other tours, all of which were very good. See this sponsored page for Funky Tours!
Anecdote on the side: as we got to the turn-off from the main M19 route to the road towards Srebrenica we were turned away by police who blocked that access road. The reason given, according to our driver-guide, who enquired with the policeman, was that there was a bicycle race going on! So we were forced to take the longer route via the Drina River (which here forms the border with Serbia) towards Bratunac. According to signs this was the Belgrade to Banja Luka race, which apparently has been organized annually since 2007 in part to celebrate the “unity” of Serbia and Republika Srpska. I cannot help but wonder whether routing this race through the main access road to Srebrenica (quite a detour actually) has an unsavoury propagandistic element to it …
You can in theory get to Srebrenica on a shoestring too – there are two to three bus connections daily from Sarajevo, but note that the memorial site at Potočari is about three four miles (6 km) north of Srebrenica itself! And it would be a rather tedious walk (and trying to get a taxi could be tricky in these remote parts).
There is no admission fee to the memorial centre and the cemetery/memorial is open at all hours. The opening times of the memorial centre seem to be somewhat elusive. The official website (supported by the British embassy in Sarajevo!) doesn’t state any in English, but I found a well hidden snippet in Bosnian only that with the help of an online translation engine told me that the centre is open daily from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.; however, at the office of the tour operator I used I was told that the memorial centre is sometimes not open at weekends. So it’s a bit unclear. But if you go on an organized tour, the operator will make sure that you get there at the right time.
If you decide to go independently it might be a good idea to contact the administration beforehand (email: info[at]srebrenicamemorial.org) to make sure your visit doesn’t clash with too many large organized groups. They can also help with finding accommodation in the vicinity to allow more time at the memorial.
Time required: These days you need a lot of time since the exhibitions at the memorial centre are so rich in details, and there’s also the intro film. Plus you have to factor in the time it takes to get to this remote location, between two and three hours from Sarajevo, thus making the excursion a full-day trip, basically. If you really want to take in absolutely everything that the memorial centre has to offer, then a single day may not be sufficient, in which case you’ll have to organize your trip independently and arrange for an overnight stay in the vicinity.
When I visited in April 2025 as part of an organized group tour, we had ca. two hours at the memorial centre (not enough!) plus about half an hour at the cemetery. In total the tour (including a lunch break) took ca. 9 hours.
Combinations with other dark destinations: Nothing specific in the immediate surroundings.
En route to Srebrenica, though, our group’s driver-guide pointed out a place by the road, and at a football field, marked with a Bosnian flag (instead of the far more common Serbian ones within Republika Srpska). This was one of the places where victims were gathered before their executions, so it’s now a minor memorial site too (hence the Bosnian flag). This may have been in Nova Kasaba, but I’m not completely sure.
See also Bosnia and Herzegovina in general, and more specifically under Sarajevo, from where tours to Srebrenica usually start. Of that city’s extensive dark-tourism portfolio the two places most related to Srebrenica are the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide and the 11/07/95 Gallery.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: North-eastern Bosnia may not be the most dramatically scenic part of the country, but there are still fairly pretty landscapes to be seen en route, especially along the mountainous sections of the drive.
But the proper touristy attractions of the country are elsewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
