How to say 'Never again' 30 years after Srebrenica? Stop the killing in Gaza today.

By Omar Suleiman

July 15, 2025

(RNS) — Standing in Srebrenica, 30 years after the genocide, you can feel the haunting presence of unburied grief. It comes not just from the memory of those 8,000 Muslim men and boys who died at the hands of the Bosnian Serb army, or the seven newly recovered bodies, whose bones I had come to help finally put to rest after decades hidden beneath Bosnian soil. As a devastating mass killing continues to unfold in Gaza, the memory of those slaughtered men and children in Srebrenica becomes profoundly more painful.

At the memorial for the seven, I listened to mothers and widows retell their stories with fresh agony. At the remembrance museum in Srebrenica, the cries of the victims coming from the video screens echoed, timeless and harrowing, as men begged for their lives, only to be mercilessly silenced.

It is an eerie and gut-wrenching experience, demanding we face the essential question: What does “Never again” truly mean?

Today, as ever, we confront that chilling paradox. The screens that bring us cries from Gaza echo those from Srebrenica. Videos flood social media platforms, capturing Israeli soldiers engaged in activities frighteningly reminiscent of what the Serbs termed “sniper safaris.” Soldiers mock their victims, filming death and humiliation, boastfully sharing brutality as entertainment, mass-produced horrors made all the more disturbing as they go viral.

At the memorial in Bosnia, European dignitaries, one after another, proclaimed the solemn promise: “Never again.” They rightfully bemoaned the holocaust of the past and expressed solidarity with Ukraine. Yet a glaring omission lingered heavily in the air — until Munira Subasic, of the Mothers of Srebrenica, shattered hypocritical silence that so many Bosnians present were feeling sickened by. With the righteous indignation only a grieving mother can summon, she asked pointedly: How can you speak of “Never again” while funding, directly or indirectly, the ongoing genocide in Gaza?

A Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a school in Bureij refugee camp is brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, central Gaza Strip, on May 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Munira reminded us profoundly that the pain of mothers transcends politics. Politicians may maneuver, posture, strategically omit uncomfortable truths; human beings must uphold humanity itself.

“Never again” is meaningless unless we confront and condemn genocide universally and unequivocally in Bosnia, Gaza and everywhere else that human life is threatened by mass violence. After she spoke, many Bosnians wearing garments bearing the Palestinian flag or the kaffiyeh came to me with tears in their eyes and apologized that it took so long for the pain to be named. That these ordinary people were different from the politicians. I already knew. I responded by saying that I was there for them, not the politicians.

My conversations in Bosnia highlighted the tragic abandonment felt by the survivors before the genocide started. Many lamented the delayed international recognition of their suffering, wishing the world had paid attention sooner. Their reflections mirror the sentiments I’ve repeatedly heard from Palestinians who have pleaded for recognition of the apartheid they faced before the full-scale genocide erupted in Gaza in 2023. Their genocide, too, has followed decades of occupation, widely documented but ignored by the international powers meant to intervene.

The survivors of Bosnia, like Palestinians today, understand intimately the cost of global indifference. They carry scars, both visible and invisible, and the testimonies of international failures that they must live with for the rest of their lives. 

Bosnia and Gaza, separated geographically but linked indelibly by shared suffering, teach us this critical lesson. The rhetoric of “Never again” is meaningless if it’s just reserved for late memorial ceremonies and performative speeches, caring too late and too little. “Never again” demands that humanity actively resist oppression wherever it appears and act courageously in defense of human dignity. Anything less makes us complicit in cycles of horror that history tragically repeats.