Teach Secondary - Issue 14.6

“Our normal can change very quickly” Jennifer Hampton explains why, 30 years on, the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia needs to be studied more than ever… I n July 2025, a cross- party group of UK politicians, including Angela Rayner and Priti Patel, gathered at St. Paul’s Cathedral to remember. Later that month, another group of politicians laid wreaths at Westminster Abbey. Elsewhere, top officials gathered at the UNAssembly while an exhibition took place at the UNheadquarters in NewYork. Hundreds of other commemorative events took place across the world. The politicians at many of these events weren’t the speakers that commanded the most attention, Instead, people’s eyes and ears were on the survivors, and their testimonies of torture, displacement and loss. Three decades on July 2025 marked 30 years since the Srebrenica genocide. Before the Bosnian War ended and the Dayton Peace Accords were signed, three years of ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serbs culminated in the systematic murder of 8,372 men and boys in Srebrenica, a two-hour drive from Sarajevo. Just two years earlier, Srebrenica had been declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN for Bosniaks fleeing ethnic cleansing in the eastern region. At that time, it was the worst atrocity to have taken place on European soil sinceWWII. In the summer of 1995, Supergrass, Pulp and Robson and Jerome were in the charts. Britpop was in the acsendance. It was the year that sawBill Clinton make history by visiting and touring Northern Ireland as the peace process there began to take shape. It was the month that saw JohnMajor win his second Conservative leadership election. Stan Collymore’s move from NottinghamForest to Liverpool for £8.5mmarked the third time that the British football transfer fee record had been broken within the past six months. Hostile rhetoric The massacre in Srebrenica was formally recognised by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2007. The genocide’s victims had been buried inmass graves in an effort to disguise the perpetrators’ war crimes. Bosnian Serb forces used heavy machinery, including bulldozers, to disturb primary graves and systemically move bodies across large distances. A series of brutal exhumations revealed not just the violated integrity of individual victims, but how people’s remains had been distributed across secondary, and even tertiary graves. Many grieving and traumatised families today still remain without any sense of closure. So what relevance does any of this have for us in secondary schools? July 2025 also saw the government announce that the UK’s voting age will to be lowered to 16 in time for the next General Election, scheduled to take place no later than August 2029. Many students entering Y8 this September will be eligible to vote. The enduring dominance of the Labour and Conservative parties has been disrupted of late with the 14.3% share of the vote and five Parliamentary seats secured by Reform in the 2024 general election, and its subsequent local and by-election wins. Reform’s website tells us that they stand for ‘ British culture, identity and values ’. They want to ‘ freeze immigration and stop the boats. ’ The explicit and unapologetic othering of a group of people echoes across history. Already, the funding of annual summer Pride events in some towns across the country has been attacked. We’ve witnessed a purportedly centrist Labour Prime Minister use hostile rhetoric, such as that deployed in his now infamous ‘Island of “The explicit andunapologetic otheringofagroupofpeople echoes across history” 92 teachwire.net/secondary