Statements on Srebrenica

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 11:02 am on 8 July 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 11:02, 8 July 2020

Llywydd, diolch yn fawr. As you said, this year, we mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. In July 1995, General Ratko Mladić and his Serbian paramilitary units overran and captured the town of Srebrenica, ignoring the fact that the area had been designated as a place free from any armed attack or other hostile act. In the days that followed the town's fall, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred. Thousands of women, children and elderly people were forcibly deported. This was the greatest atrocity on European soil since the end of the second world war.

Today, we remember those who lost their lives in Srebrenica. Our thoughts are with those who have survived them, and who have done so much to make sure that their memory is never far away from the international community. Srebrenica is another name on the list of towns and countries tainted by hate and genocide, but it is also a reminder of what happens when hate and prejudice go unchallenged. It's a reminder to us all to stand together against that hatred and division in our own communities in all its forms, wherever we are in the world. At the Holocaust memorial service earlier this year that a number of us here attended, we heard from Srebrenica, and we heard that slogan that is so often said, 'Never again', and the gap that we all must work so hard to close between that ambition and the actions that we still see around us in the world. We must learn from these dark moments of history.

Mae Cymru'n cofio Srebrenica—Wales remembers Srebrenica.