Yazidis mourn with Muslims in Bosnia

Four Yazidis from Iraq joined thousands of Bosnian Muslims at a commemoration on Tuesday of the 8,000 men and boys killed in 1995 at Srebrenica and called for atrocities committed against their sect by Islamic State to be recognised as genocide.

The Srebrenica massacre by Bosnian Serb forces near the end of Bosnia’s war was declared a genocide by two UN courts and leaders including Gen Ratko Mladic have been prosecuted at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The 2014 killings at Sinjar of thousands of Yazidis by Islamic State militants, who buried some alive and took thousands of women as slaves, have also been called a genocide by a UN commission, but activists are seeking wider recognition and prosecutions.

“We have endured horrific abuse and persecution — the Bosnian Muslims at the hands of Serbs and Yazidis at the hands of [Islamic State] and we share the memories and recognise each others’ feelings,” said Hussam Abdukah, a Yazidi lawyer who is documenting the crimes and is a member of a peace-building programme in northern Iraq.

The commemoration of the killings at Srebrenica 22 years ago included the burials of 71 newly identified victims at a cemetery near the eastern town, bringing the total number interred there to 6,575. More than 1,000 men and boys are still missing. The Serb forces dumped the victims’ bodies in pits and subsequently dug them up and scattered them in a systematic effort to conceal the crime, Europe’s worst atrocity since the Second World War.

Yazidis will commemorate the Sinjar massacre in August.

Activists attending the anniversary said they hoped to use the Srebrenica families’ experiences to help build cases that could eventually be used in international criminal courts.

“We urge the international community that just like in Srebrenica it helps open mass graves and build cases because we fear that traces of the crime might stay hidden,” said Basma Naji, who fled Sinjar just hours before the attack.

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic was jailed in 2016 for 40 years by The Hague tribunal while Mladic, his military chief, is still being tried on genocide charges. Dozens of low-ranking Bosnian Serb officials were jailed over the Srebrenica atrocity. /

WE HAVE ENDURED HORRIFIC ABUSE … BOSNIAN MUSLIMS BY SERBS, AND YAZIDIS AT THE HANDS OF ISLAMIC STATE