I wasn’t alive when it happened.
But I’ve read the names.
I’ve seen the photos they tried to hide.
The mass graves.
The children’s shoes.
The women’s screams.
In Bosnia, during the 1990s, over 100,000 people were killed.
Many more disappeared.
Entire villages vanished.
It wasn’t just soldiers.
It was women.
It was children.
It was families torn apart in the most brutal ways imaginable.
And in July 1995, what happened in Srebrenica became a symbol of that horror:
Thousands of men and boys executed.
But also, women raped, hunted, displaced.
Mothers left to bury bones IF they were lucky enough to find them.
I think of the women still waiting.
The children who never got to grow up.
The lullabies that ended in gunfire.
The kitchens that never smelled like home again.
It’s been 30 years.
And I still don’t know how to speak of it without trembling.
But what I do know is this:
We honour the dead by refusing to forget them.
We honour the mothers by naming what happened.
We honour the children by teaching the truth.
This was a genocide.
And even now, in 2025, there are those who try to deny it.
Bury the memory like they buried the bodies.
So today, I write this to remind you:
We remember.
Not just the numbers.
But the names and the faces.
The women who searched the hills for their sons.
The girls who survived with nothing but scars.
The children who saw too much and lived to carry it.
If remembrance is all we have, let it be loud.
Let it be fierce.
Let it be full of the kind of love that refuses to let genocide fade into history.
Because forgetting is a privilege.
And silence is betrayal.
One genocide was buried beneath headlines. Another is unfolding in real time.
And I can’t stop thinking, thirty years from now, will someone write an email like this about Gaza?
Will they speak of mass graves and motherless children, of lullabies lost to airstrikes?
Will they wonder how the world watched—and stayed silent?
Let this not be another chapter we mourn too late. Let us remember Bosnia by refusing to look away from Gaza.
With grief, fury, and an unshakeable memory,
Mariam