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SREBRENICA: Three decades after their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons were killed in the bloodiest episode of the Bosnian war, women who survived the Srebrenica massacre find some solace in having been able to unearth their loved ones from far-away mass graves and bury them individually at the town’s memorial cemetery.
The women say that living near the graves reminds them not only of the tragedy but of their love and perseverance in seeking justice for the men they lost.
“I found peace here, in the proximity of my loved ones,” said Fadila Efendic, 74, who returned to her family home in 2002, seven years after being driven away from Srebrenica and witnessing her husband and son being taken away to be killed.
The Srebrenica killings were the crescendo of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which came after the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalist passions and territorial ambitions that set Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic populations — Croats and Bosniaks.
On July 11, 1995, Serbs overran Srebrenica, at the time a UN-protected safe area. They separated at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters and slaughtered them. Those who tried to escape were chased through the woods and over the mountains around town.
Bosniak women and children were packed onto buses and expelled.
The executioners tried to erase the evidence of their crime, plowing the bodies into hastily dug mass graves and scattering them among other burial sites.
Mothers have sought the remains of loved ones for years
As soon as the war was over, Efendic and other women like her vowed to find their loved ones, bring them back and give them a proper burial.
“At home, often, especially at dusk, I imagine that they are still around, that they went out to go to work and that they will come back,” Efendic said, adding: “That idea, that they will return, that I am near them, is what keeps me going.”
To date, almost 90 percent of those reported missing since the Srebrenica massacre have been accounted for through their remains exhumed from hundreds of mass graves scattered around the eastern town. Body parts are still being found in death pits around Srebrenica and identified through painstaking DNA analysis.
So far, the remains of more than 6,700 people – including Efendic’s husband and son — have been found in several different mass graves and reburied at the memorial cemetery inaugurated in Srebrenica in 2003 at the relentless insistence of the women.
“We wrote history in white marble headstones and that is our success,” said Kada Hotic, who lost her husband, son and 56 other male relatives in the massacre. “Despite the fact that our hearts shiver when we speak about our sons, our husbands, our brothers, our people, our town, we refused to let (what happened to) them be forgotten.”
The Srebrenica carnage has been declared a genocide by two UN courts.
Dozens of Srebrenica women testified before the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, helping put behind bars close to 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officials, collectively sentenced to over 700 years in prison.
The loss that never goes away
After decades of fighting to keep the truth about Srebrenica alive, the women now spend their days looking at scarce mementos of their former lives, imagining the world that could have been.
Sehida Abdurahmanovic, who lost dozens of male relatives in the massacre, including her husband and her brother, often stares at a few family photos, two handwritten notes from her spouse and some personal documents she managed to take with her in 1995.
“I put these on the table to refresh my memories, to bring back to life what I used to have,” she said. “Since 1995, we have been struggling with what we survived and we can never, not even for a single day, be truly relaxed.”
Suhra Malic, 90, who lost two sons and 30 other male relatives, is also haunted by the memories.
“It is not a small feat to give birth to children, to raise them, see them get married and build them a house of their own and then, just as they move out and start a life of independence, you lose them, they are gone and there is nothing you can do about it,” Malic said.
Summers in Srebrenica are difficult, especially as July 11, the anniversary of the day the killing began in 1995, approaches.
In her own words, Mejra Djogaz “used to be a happy mother” to three sons, and now, “I look around myself and I am all alone, I have no one.”
“Not a single night or day goes by that I do not wake up at two or three after midnight and start thinking about how they died,” she said.
Aisa Omerovic agrees. Her husband, two sons and 42 other male relatives were killed in the massacre. Alone at home, she said she often hears the footsteps of her children and imagines them walking into the room. “I wait for the door to open; I know that it won’t open, but still, I wait.”

MEXICO CITY: A fierce protest in Mexico City railing against gentrification and mass tourism was fueled by government failures and active promotion to attract digital nomads, according to experts, who said tension had been mounting for years.
The criticism comes after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum alleged that Friday’s protest was marked by xenophobia, reviving a debate over an influx of Americans in the city.
Many Mexicans say they’ve been priced out of their neighborhoods — in part because of a move made by Sheinbaum in 2022, when she was the Mexico City mayor and signed an agreement with Airbnb and UNESCO to boost tourism and attract digital nomads despite concern over the impact short-term rentals could have.
‘Gringo: Stop stealing our home’
On Friday, that came to a head. A largely peaceful protest of hundreds of demonstrators marched through tourism centers of the city with signs reading “Gringo: Stop stealing our home” and “Housing regulations now!”
Near the end of the march, a group of protesters turned violent, breaking the windows of storefronts and looting a number of businesses. In one case, a protester slammed a butter knife against the window of a restaurant where people were hiding, and another person painted “kill a gringo” on a nearby wall.
“The xenophobic displays seen at that protest have to be condemned. No one should be able to say ‘any nationality get out of our country’ even over a legitimate problem like gentrification,” Sheinbaum said Monday. “We’ve always been open, fraternal.”
The frustrations were built upon years of mass tourism and rising rent prices in large swathes of the city. The influx of foreigners began around 2020, when Americans flooded into the Mexico City to work remotely, dodge coronavirus restrictions and take advantage of cheaper living costs.
In the years since, choice neighborhoods like Roma and Condesa, lush central areas dotted with cafes and markets, have grown increasingly populated by foreign tourists and the remote workers known as digital nomads, and there are more temporary housing units rented through companies like Airbnb that cater to tourists.
As they have, rent and living prices have soared and English has been increasingly common on the streets of those areas. Some groups have described the phenomenon as a sort of “neo-colonialism.”
Mounting tensions
The Mexico City Anti-Gentrification Front, one of the organizations behind the protest, it was “completely against” any acts of physical violence and denied that the protests were xenophobic. Instead, the organization said the protest was a result of years of failures by the local government to address the root of the problems.
“Gentrification isn’t just foreigners’ fault, it’s the fault of the government and these companies that prioritize the money foreigners bring,” the organization said in a statement. Meanwhile “young people and the working class can’t afford to live here.”
In its list of demands, the organization called for greater rent controls, mandates that locals have a voice in larger development projects in their area, stricter laws making it harder for landlords to throw out residents and prioritizing Mexican renters over foreigners.
Mexico’s protest comes on the back of a wave of similar protests across Europe railing against mass tourism. Tensions in Mexico have also been compounded by wider inequalities and the Trump administration targeting Latino communities in the US as it ramps up deportations.
The US Department of Homeland Security took a jab at protesters Sunday, writing in a post on the social media platform X: “If you are in the United States illegally and wish to join the next protest in Mexico City, use the CBP Home app to facilitate your departure.”
Government failures
Protesters’ cries against government failures were echoed by experts, who said that surging gentrification is a product of both shortage of affordable housing in the city and longtime government failures to regulate the housing market.
Antonio Azuela, lawyer and sociologist and others said that they do see the protest as a xenophobic backlash, and around 2020 the core of the problem was the influx of “digital nomads” in the city, but it grew out of hand because of lax housing laws.
“What has made this explode is lack of regulation in the market,” Azuela said.
Mexico City’s government over the course of decades has made a few efforts to control development and create affordable housing.
Legislators estimated there are about 2.7 million houses and apartments in the city, but it needs about 800,000 more. But such affordable housing developments that have popped up often are pushed off to the fringes of the city, said Luis Salinas, a researcher at National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied gentrification in Mexico City for years.
Taking advantage of ‘insufficient’ laws
Controls, meanwhile, have been marked by lack of enforcement, which developers travel services companies like Airbnb take advantage of, he said.
Today, more than 26,000 properties in Mexico City are currently listed on Airbnb, according to the Inside Airbnb, an advocacy organization that tracks the company’s impact on residential communities through data. That’s compared to 36,000 properties in New York City and 19,000 in Barcelona, where protests have also broken out.
“The government has treated housing like it’s merchandise,” Salinas said. The actions the government is taking “are completely insufficient. The federal government needs to be intervening far more nowadays.”
Airbnb said it helped contribute more than a billion dollars in “economic impact” to Mexico City last year and that spending by guests has supported 46,000 jobs in the city. “What’s needed is regulation based not on prohibitions, but on respect for rights and transparency of obligations,” it said in a statement.
Last year, Mexico City’s government approved the most ambitious rent control law since the 1940s in an effort to control prices and also set caps on short-term rentals to 180 nights a year, but Salinas said that enforcement of short-term rental legislation has been put on pause until after the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
And even then, the country’s government will have to take far greater actions to get the situation under control, said Azuela.
“This isn’t going to end by just reigning in Airbnb,” he said. “They’re going to have to do a whole lot more.”