During the 1992-95 war of aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia under the Milošević regime initiated a campaign of genocidal violence that saw its local Bosnian Serb proxies systematically kill, torture, and expel non-Serbs from their ancestral homes. This campaign, collectively forming the Bosnian Genocide, culminated in the mass murder of 8,372 Bosniaks in Srebrenica in July 1995, the largest single war crime in Europe since World War II.

By then it had led to a vast landscape of mass graves and concentration camps, approximately 100,000 deaths (with some 82% of civilian deaths being Bosniak), and 1.2 million refugees, many of whom eventually found a new home in the United States.

At key junctures, the United States has stood on the side of the victims: a 2005 resolution unambiguously labeling the massacre in Srebrenica an act of genocide and identifying its Serb nationalist perpetrators passed near-unanimously (370-1) in the House and unanimously in the Senate. In this way, the U.S. demonstrated moral leadership in its policy toward BiH and the Western Balkans, even preceding the landmark ruling in Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro at the International Court of Justice in 2007.

More recently, however, this legacy has come under threat. Partly in a misguided attempt to appease a once-again aggressive Serbia, U.S. diplomacy today shies away from clearly labeling the parties responsible for the Bosnian Genocide—Republika Srpska and its benefactors in Belgrade—and the Greater Serbian political project motivating their crimes. Instead, it all-too-often falls back on a politically correct language of “all side-ism”, emphasizing the need for reconciliation while leaving both victims and perpetrators unspecified. Just as it is impossible to speak of the Holocaust without acknowledging the responsibility of Nazi Germany, it is impossible to speak of the Bosnian Genocide without addressing the role of Serbia and Republika Srpska.

USABIH advocates for renewed U.S. leadership related to the Bosnian Genocide, including:

• Combatting denial, seeking individual and collective justice for victims, and preserving their memory for future generations
• Unambiguously labeling, condemning, and confronting those responsible for the genocide and their political project, including by standing behind a revitalized Bosnian state judiciary that will enforce existing laws against genocide denial and persecute the many perpetrators who remain at large
• Empowering victims by increasing targeted support for returnee communities in Republika Srpska and holding local authorities responsible for failures to maintain their security and dignity
• Ensuring that state authorities in Sarajevo have the capacity to prevent the crimes of the 1990s from ever happening again.