Writing – Mathilde

Srebrenica. For a long time, this word evoked something terrible to me without me knowing what
exactly. I have the distant memory of having heard about it. A simple paragraph in my history
book in the chapter on the fall of the USSR, if I remember correctly.
Srebrenica, when, what, who, where? It was all very confusing for me. You never hear about it.
Yet it is our responsibility to remember because what happened in Srebrenica may happen again
and everywhere. Because what happened in Srebrenica concerns us all. The hatred of the other for
his culture, his religion, his difference, his otherness leads step by step to destruction in its most
violent expression.
What happened in Srebrenica is recent. One might have thought that the “never again” expressed
after the Second World War would have made it possible to prevent another massacre. However,
this is not the case. This means that we must remain vigilant if we do not want to repeat the
mistakes of the past, and that is why we need education and commemoration.