Out to the east of Sarajevo, less than 50 miles as the crow flies but nearly three hours away over twisting mountain roads, where the rhythms and rabble of the capital feel worlds away, there is a cemetery.
It contains more than 6,000 near-identical headstones – gleaming white, waist-height pillars with messages in a mixture of Arabic and Bosnian – in row upon row, like endless waves silently washing across a sloping shore.
Every one bears the same year: 1995.
On the other side of the road looms a partially renovated industrial complex. It used to be a battery factory. Now it’s a memorial centre.
In between, it was the sight of one of the so-called international community’s greatest failures: a betrayal so heinous, and with such horrific consequences, that it was, is and will always remain, unforgivable.
Read more: Bosnian genocide: Srebrenica survivors speak out
As the former Yugoslavia violently collapsed and conflict wracked the region in 1992-1995, this area became home to huge numbers of mostly Muslim refugees.
By April 1993 the situation had become so dire that the UN intervened, declaring the enclave a safe zone and promising protection to those desperately fleeing the fighting.
A little over two years later, on the 11th of July 1995, the region fell to Bosnian Serb forces; the very next day, in front of the nearby UN compound to which people had fled, soldiers began separating the crowd into two groups.
Women and younger children were forcibly removed from the area, while men and boys were transferred to various nearby locations, brutally murdered, and then buried in mass graves.
This is Srebrenica, where 8,372 men and boys were massacred in a genocide that remains “the largest mass murder in Europe since World War Two".
Inside the memorial centre the story of the horrors that occurred here is retold in documentary footage, recorded testimony, reproduced documents, and some of the most powerful photographs I’ve ever seen.
It is all brought together to offer a painstaking and unflinching insight into what happened, much of it in full view of the UN.
But for me, it was sitting in that cemetery that had the biggest impact.
I already knew much of the timeline of what had happened here, and could have watched the footage, read the accounts, and viewed the pictures at home.
What I never could have done was feel what I felt that day.
Read more: Srebrenica massacre: Horror of the darkest war crime since WW2 still haunts me
Reflecting on his experience reporting on the Rwandan Genocide, BBC journalist Fergal Keane once wrote that it had robbed him of a belief in an “ultimate force for good” that would always, inevitably, conquer evil.
It had been, he explained, “whittled away”, massacre by massacre, body by body, cut by cut, until it finally “disappeared”.
I taught those words for years as an English teacher, teasing out the connotations and examining the balance of the structures, but sitting amongst the graves of thousands of victims, and looking across the spaces left for the thousands still to be found, I understood them in a way that simply was not possible before.
The same is true of another of Keane’s descriptions – that of genocide as “the degradation of all humanity”.
What happened here shows the very worst of what humans are capable of doing to one another, and it is always so much easier to look away rather than confront that reality.
I understand the temptation to view the crimes of Srebrenica as acts of sheer, inhuman barbarism, and the comfort that is offered by dismissing the perpetrators as monsters.
But monsters are not real.
Monsters weren’t responsible for Srebrenica, just like monsters weren’t responsible for mass murder and genocide in Sinjar, Darfur, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Cambodia, Germany, Armenia, Australia or anywhere else.
Monsters didn’t do any of those things – people did.
And no matter how much we want to deny it, those people were just like you and I.
Read more: Why we must remember the genocide in Bosnia
The world is fond of responding to events like Srebrenica by declaring that they will “never again” be allowed to occur.
It is a lie. It is always a lie. It will always be a lie.
And we are lying not just to the victims, but to ourselves.
These crimes will happen again. And again. They always do, over and over, with slightly altered details and slightly different faces and slightly revised excuses.
In the face of all that, acts of remembrance may seem futile, but nothing could be further from the truth.
For, so long as we remember the victims, and continue to pursue justice on their behalf, then they can never truly disappear, and the crimes committed against them are never truly complete.
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