What we have been warning about for weeks is no longer a matter of anonymous information, speculation or our estimates, said the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Now we have black and white. The District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Bijeljina asked the Zvornik Police Department to search the MCS and seize the documentation from the Center. This is clearly stated in the official letter of the Prosecutor’s Office dated September 24, 2026.
At the same time, the pressure on the employees of the Memorial Center has been going on for weeks. Dozens of people from the MCS are on arbitrary lists for questioning, and now the Republika Srpska police have been given the task to come to the institution itself and take documentation from it, they state in the statement.
We will not normalize this procedure. We will not accept that the institutions of the Republika Srpska, whose political leadership still denies or relativizes the genocide in Srebrenica, come to Potočari to demonstrate force against the people who keep the memory of its victims.
This is about much more than financial documentation. This is an attempt to use police and prosecutorial pressure to discipline an institution that was founded precisely to preserve the facts about the genocide and the voice of its survivors, the Memorial Center said.
And that’s why we have to be very clear. The memorial center will not voluntarily hand over its documentation to the police and the prosecution of Republika Srpska. We will not cooperate in a process that we consider a politically motivated persecution of our institution and our employees. If they want to enter the Memorial Center and take what they want, they will have to do it by force.
It’s not a threat. This is a description of what will happen if they decide to use force against a public institution of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We have nothing to hide. Quite the opposite: we are open to the control and action of the competent institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But we will not accept being persecuted by the police and the prosecutor’s office of Republika Srpska.
In particular, we will not accept that an institution that was created in a system that produced genocide now assigns itself the role of moral and legal arbiter over the Memorial Center and its employees. Our fathers were first tied, then shot, then buried in mass graves, and their remains were later systematically dug up and scattered to hide the traces of the crime. Today, we are expected to believe that this very system is coming to Potočare in order to establish order, legality and morality. We do not accept this grotesque reversal of roles.
The memorial center will continue to do its work. We will guard the graves. We will keep the documents. We will guard the facts. And, above all, we will protect the right of the survivors to remember their own history and talk about it without fear of police boots, they said at the end of the announcement.
