After Survival: what does 'home' mean post-genocide?

Today, 11 July, marks the 31st annual International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica, when Bosnian Serb forces murdered around 8,000 Muslim men and boys in a matter of days, and forcibly expelled thousands more from their homes. Despite the thirty-one years that have passed since this massacre, the struggle to rebuild communities after the violence has stopped has not been easy or straightforward.

Each year, the day is marked with official wreath laying, and names of the victims read aloud to collectively call attention to Bosnia’s historic trauma. It is right that the world pauses to commemorate. But there is one question that tends to go unasked once the anniversary passes: what happens after survival? Not the week after, or the year after, but the decades after, once the graves are marked, the trials concluded and the cameras gone.

Returning to a Place That No Longer Feels Like Home

In July 1995, over 2 million were expelled and displaced from their homes in Bosnia. The return of refugees to their homes is a policy goal – and foundational UN mandated right which is often measured in numbers. How many families have been resettled? How many houses are to be rebuilt? These are the questions policy wonks will ask. But what these numbers and metrics fail to capture is that a house is also a home. This is the quiet difficulty many Bosniaks faced in going back to towns and villages after the war. The physical structure might be restored and the legal paperwork settled, but what’s harder to repair is a sense of safety and belonging, particularly when returning also means living alongside people who may have perpetrated violence against your family.

There is a specific kind of grief in this: mourning a place that still exists but no longer feels like yours. It is a kind of displacement that exists even when the displacement is technically resolved, because on paper, you’re home.

One returning Bosniak told the BBC when he goes back to eastern Bosnia he sometimes spots men who he last saw in 1995 executing hundreds of his kin from Srebrenica.

They are walking, laughing in my face, and saying, ‘I am the one who killed Muslims, Turks’ and they are walking free.

This tension isn’t unique to Bosnia. It reappears whenever ceasefires are announced but the deeper questions of safety, belonging and return remain unresolved. In Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been destroyed, leaving many families without homes, schools, hospitals or basic infrastructure to return to; before return can become possible, the conditions that make ordinary life must first be rebuilt. In Afghanistan, displacement is shaped by insecurity, economic collapse and restrictions that have transformed everyday life, particularly for women and girls, leaving many families unsure whether return would offer stability or simply a different form of confinement. In Syria, those considering return must weigh damaged homes, missing relatives, uncertain property rights, the risk of detention and the possibility that their communities no longer exist as they once did. Displacement rarely ends when the fighting stops. More often, it changes form.

Invisible Burdens

Trauma doesn’t observe a ceasefire. Grief doesn’t resolve on a timeline set by peace agreements. For many survivors, the years after the genocide meant carrying loss quietly, often without access to the kind of psychological support that might have helped, because the world’s attention, and its funding, had already moved elsewhere.

Some of this weight is harder to name than others. The mass rape carried out during the genocide was not incidental; it was used deliberately, as a strategy of war. For the women who survived it, recovery has often meant confronting a second injustice on top of the first: silence, stigma, and a reluctance in their own communities to fully reckon with what was done to them. Healing, in these cases, isn’t just personal. It requires a community willing to listen.

And loss compounds across generations in ways that are easy to overlook. Children who grew up without fathers, without stability, without full access to education, carried disadvantages into their own adulthood and, in some cases, passed pieces of that inheritance on to their children in turn.

Dozens of schools in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina operate under a “two schools under one roof“ policy. In these schools, Bosniak and Croat students share the same building but are physically separated by walls or different entrances. They learn different curricula and histories. By physically and educationally dividing children based on ethnicity, this system deepens social fractures and fosters lifelong prejudice between community groups. Furthermore, teaching conflicting historical narratives prevents national reconciliation while the redundant administrative structures waste vital economic resources.

Bosnia shows that justice and healing are not the same thing. Courts can convict individuals for perpetrating acts of genocide, but a conviction doesn’t reconcile a divided town. In parts of Bosnia, genocide denial remains and is weaponised by politicians who reinforce a separatist agenda. The current political landscape entrenches distance between communities rather than closing it.

Peace agreements are good at stopping violence. They are far less reliable at producing trust. The gap between the absence of war and the presence of real peace is where survivors have spent the last thirty years.

What Rebuilding Actually Requires

If loss and mistrust can be inherited, so can resilience, but it must be built deliberately, and it takes far longer than initial emergency response. Recovery of this kind depends on sustained investment, and education is one of its clearest foundations. A school offers more than literacy; it offers children structure, routine, and the quiet signal that a future is worth preparing for.

This is where Muslim Aid have focused much of our work in Bosnia, supporting schools and creating spaces where children can be children again, rather than inheriting a national trauma they never chose. It is not a tokenistic gesture; rather, it is a longterm investment in dignity, and in a form of recovery that outlasts the news cycle.

Beyond the Headlines

A genocide is not commemorated only by the lives lost, though its victims must never be forgotten. It is remembered also by the decades survivors spend afterwards rebuilding and trying to construct something resembling normal life in its shadow.

As Elie Wiesel wrote, “to forget the dead would be to kill them a second time.” Remembering Srebrenica each July matters. But remembrance without ongoing support risks becoming a ritual disconnected from the people still living its aftermath. The lesson extends well beyond Bosnia: to Gaza, to Afghanistan, to the Rohingya, to Syria and anywhere people have had to rebuild lives from nothing, long after the world stopped watching. Humanitarian work does not end when a conflict does. If anything, that’s when the real work begins.

This July, as we mark the anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, support communities still living through the long process of recovery through education, psychological support, and the everyday work of rebuilding a life worth living - here.

We also invite you to learn more about the genocide in Bosnia here.