“Live for what they died for”: Srebrenica and Gaza genocide documentaries move London community
(A hand filled with keffiyeh patterns holds a white Srebrenica flower, a memorial symbol for the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995. The eleven petals commemorate July 11th, the day the genocide began, and the white petals symbolize innocence, burials, and the dress of mourning women. Artwork by Incé Husain.)
“I went to Bosnia not expecting to necessarily see Gaza, but everywhere I looked in Bosnia, there was Gaza. I think maybe some of the people that feel closest to Gaza in the world today are in Bosnia,” says Palestinian community member Nabil Sultan of his visit to Bosnia, sharing his reflections on the documentary Survivors of Srebrenica screened at London Public Library on the evening of August 29th. “You see it on the streets, in the graffiti, in the keffiyehs people wear. Even in Srebrenica they have the keffiyehs — the families of the victims who were going to mourn their family members had their keffiyehs and had the shirts saying Free Falasteen.”
Short documentaries Survivors of Srebrenica, Ahmad Alive, and Bisan were shown in Islamic Relief Canada’s event “Survivors of Genocide — Triple Feature Documentary Screening.” All proceeds from the screening tickets — $10 per person — went towards Islamic Relief’s humanitarian efforts. Islamic Relief has a consistent presence in Bosnia and in Gaza today.
The films were screened in Wolf Performance Hall to an audience that listened, learned, and felt. Some cried, holding each other with convictions of resolve. Community members with ties to Bosnia and Palestine spoke onstage.
***
Survivors of Srebrenica is filled with white gravestones.
A Srebrenica genocide survivor gazes out at the gravestones, listing the killings of her father, grandfather, uncle, and other family members who were some of over 8000 Bosniaks executed by the Serbian Army of Republica Srprska forces in July 1995. “I was only ten, so I can’t tell much,” she says, “It is a pain we carry for the rest of our lives.”
Palestinian-American Imam Omar Suleiman walks among the gravestones. “These people were slaughtered in cold blood because they were Muslims, nothing else,” he says.
Some Bosnian Muslims dig fresh graves near the headstones, burying martyrs who were only found thirty years after their murders. Suleiman stares at rows of differently sized shoes commemorating the martyrs, asserting, “there’s absolutely nothing that distinguishes you from these people.” He reads that over 1300 mosques were destroyed and stares at images of Imams who were killed — “each had a masjid and they had their grave.”
Bosniaks had fled Serbian forces into surrounding mountainous forests; footage showed a father, held at gunpoint by Serbian soldiers, forced to call his son, Nermin, from the woods to be executed. Srebrenica had been declared a United Nations safezone before it was overrun by Serbian forces; graffiti in Srebrenica re-acronyms the UN: “UNITED NOTHING”. The film ends with white lettering on a black screen: In Bosnia, even the mountains carry the echoes of their forced cries.
The call to prayer, too, still sounds.
“The greatest way to honour your martyrs is not to memorialize them,” said Suleiman. “The greatest way to honour your martyrs is to live for what they died for.”
***
“I try to travel back home every year,” says Bosnian community member Alen Dautovic. “Even though thirty years have passed since the war in Bosnia, its impact is still felt every single day. Every time you try to sit with the locals, eventually the conversation shifts to war. Everyone remembers it and everyone carries it… While the war may have ended physically, it continues in so many other ways, in the psychosocial wounds that never fully healed, in the economic struggles that keep families trapped, and in the weight of the trauma that gets passed down from one generation to the next.”
Bosnia was split into two largely autonomous regions in December 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Accords by Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia: the Serb-majority Republic of Srpska, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Bosnian Muslim majority and a Croatian minority. Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, is mostly in the Federation. The regions share control over the army, top court systems, and tax administration, and are overseen by the international Office of the High Representative created to maintain the Dayton Accords.
Dautovic describes the Republic of Srpska, where the town of Srebrenica lies, today. Numerous mosques destroyed in 1995 have not been rebuilt. Memorials of convicted war criminals soar. Bosniaks are harassed, threatened, and face high unemployment rates that include exclusion from public sector jobs. Milorad Dodik, who served as president of Republic of Srpska from 2022 to 2025, denies the Srbrenica genocide and other massacres in the Bosnian city of Tuzla and the main marketplace in Sarajevo; has called Bosniaks “the most ordinary genetic liars”; stated that they should convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy as a “concrete political solution”; and pushed for the Republic of Srpska’s separation from Bosnia to join Serbia. He was removed from office earlier this year by Bosnian electoral authorities for defying the Dayton Accords through his secessionist actions, including an attempt to remove Serbian forces from the national army and boycotting the Bosnian joint presidency, parliament, and government that requires his participation for the country to run. Dautovic says Dodik’s actions “mirror the steps that led to the war” and “undermine Bosnia’s fragile peace.”
When Dautovic drove from Serbia to the border of Bosnia with his friend, Hamza, and presented their passports, Serbian officials noted Hamza’s Muslim name, laughed, and pulled them over “for hours on end.”
“They searched all of our belongings, and had us on the side, and they stripped us down to our underwear. This is one of the attempts and one example that they do to create discomfort and humiliation in our lives as Bosnians.”
He shares that the suffering endured by Bosnians is denied even in London. Two years ago, the city of London acknowledged the Srebrenica genocide and approved a monument of rememberance for the Bosnian Canadian Islamic Centre of London - a bench with a plaque - in the Civic Gardens in Springbank Park. The plaque reads: In memory of the innocent victims of the Srebrenica genocide, July 11th, 1995, where more than 8372 Bosniak men and boys were brutally murdered by Serbian forces. Never Forget. Never Repeat.
A week later, the bench was stolen. The City replaced it, but the perpetrator was never identified. Some Bosnians see the theft as genocide denial and silencing grief.
“I regretted that I didn’t know much about Bosnia before I had gone there,” shared Palestinian community member Khaled Sultan, who visited Bosnia with Nabil and others. “You heard about Srebrenica and the attacks and what happened, but I chose not to learn about that genocide for thirty years until I got on a plane, landed in Bosnia, and then it hit me right in the face what happened — the ethnic cleansing, the genocide.”
In the people of Srebrenica, Khaled witnessed a coexisting fragility and resilience. He calls them “proud people” who “chose not to be victims (but) heroes.” Like Nabil, he saw that they bore Palestinian flags while immersed in their own grief for Srebrenica’s martyrs.
“People were in their state of pain and sorrow and memories, but at the same time, they had the commitment to stand up against genocide and oppression and injustice. You could see it in the flags that they were waving. They weren’t waving Bosnian flags, they were waving Palestinian flags. They were wearing Palestinian flags, they were wearing the colors of Falasteen and “Free Falasteen” on their shirts, on their backs.”
Nabil spoke of honouring the heroes of Bosnia. He met an Imam who believed there was “too much victim narrative” in Bosnia, and many Bosniaks he talked with celebrated political leader Alija Izetbegovic — who led Bosnia to independence from Yugoslavia in 1992 as its president and negotiated the 1995 Dayton Accords. Izetbegovic did not villainize the West. In 1997, he said: “The West is not rotten. Islam is the best, that is true, but we are not the best. Instead of hating the West, let us compete with it. Let’s have a dialogue.”
“The person that was on the minds and tongues of all Bosnians that I met and spoke with was the late hero and leader Alija Izetbegovic, who was a philosopher, a thinker, a leader, a warrior, a man of the people, and a man who loved his identity and loved his people… He showed people that you can be Western and you can be Muslim, and that is the beauty of what the Bosnian people represent. But there were people in Europe who could not accept that there are Muslims amongst them. Till this day, the Serbs do not call Bosnians ‘Bosnians’. They call them Turks,” said Nabil. “The brutality of what the Serbs did to the innocent people of Bosnia reminds you of what the Zionists are doing in Gaza.”
He describes the people of Bosnia as peaceful, loving, and disbelieving that the Serbs, “their fellow neighbours”, would harm them. The four-year siege of Sarajevo by Serbian forces began in 1992, a month after Bosnia’s independence. A total blockade, Sarajevo was denied food, power, and water, and nearly starved until the United Nations intervened. Bombed daily, Sarajevo is described in a 1993 Guardian article as being full of traumatized children who tried to seek joy and play: Everywhere you go, urchins are on the streets, playing football and tennis in the housing estates amid heaps of burning rubbish, turning charred and gutted buildings into adventure playgrounds. If you sit midway up a tower block and listen to the din outside, the two dominant sounds are of children playing and bullets flying. A 2017 report by Amnesty International states that over 20,000 women and girls were raped in the three years of war, a number Nabil said was “one of the most painful realities” he came to understand about Bosnia. Elma, a survivor from Vlasenica, recounted: “I watched them take my father and my younger brother away. Then they brutally killed them and left their bodies in the field next to the house. My father was so old and frail; I don’t understand why they needed to do this. These men were our neighbours. Then, I was taken to the camp where I lived through ten days of torture. There, they beat me and raped me and other girls, often in groups.” Rape survivors are still seeking justice today, plagued by slow court cases where they are obliged to give retraumatizing testimonies over and over, and that largely end in perpetrators being acquitted, given reduced sentences , or allowed to pay fines instead of serving a sentence.
Nabil describes his understanding of Bosniak resistance through the siege of Sarajevo.
“Children and civilians refused to surrender. They picked up whatever they could, they fought with whatever they could. And the city of Sarajevo refused to surrender to the oppressors,” Nabil said. “Because of their resistance today, Bosnia stands as an independent Muslim country. And had they surrendered it would not have been the case. They knew that the only reason they were being killed was because of their (Muslim) identity. And this only strengthened their faith, this only strengthened their roots and their identity.”
Nehal Al-Tarhuni, a Palestinian-Lebanese community member, shared the ties she has to Bosnia through her son.
“I am not Bosnian, but my son is. My son is from a Bosnian background and that makes me a proud Bosnian woman. And if it wasn’t for the courage, for the resilience, for the sumud of the Palestinian people, for the snaga of the Bosnian people, my son wouldn’t be here today and our peoples wouldn't be here today.”
She urged all to prepare themselves before watching documentaries that harrowingly teach about the world order.
“You’re going to have a limit. Respect that limit, make your prayers for the people of Falasteen, the people of Bosnia, then ground yourself and reconnect to the reality of your life. How can you, in practical terms, honour these things that you’ve just witnessed?”
***
Ahmad Alive is filled with the crack of Israeli bombs.
Buildings crumble, bodies bleed, hospitals overflow, tents of displacement overcrowd Rafah, people wail and wade through rubble. Interwoven is the worn face of 24 year old Palestinian journalist Ahmad Ghunaim, who films it live on his phone: “Nobody sees what's happening to us, I will show the world what is happening to us.”
His footage is practical, pained, earnest. “Hi, it’s Ahmad, I’m alive,” he begins each loop of reporting. “All of my house was bombed and destroyed. Now, I will stay in the streets, without money, without anything. This is my life. Alhumdullilah.”
He films from a tent, from a car, from the streets, from hospitals, narrating the Israeli occupation bombing everything. He holds a charred, screaming baby in his arms with an unknown name, an unknown family. He learns that his friend, journalist Ayat Khadoura, was martyred.
“Hi, it’s Ahmad, I’m alive,” he says. “There were so many dead bodies with nowhere to put them and we had to start storing them in ice cream trucks. I don't know if this is maybe the last time I will speak or this is the last video I will ever film. Please don't forget me.”
In Rafah, he is elated to be with his family and his best friend, and procures a $2000 tent that does not protect from the cold winter, joining more than a million displaced people. After falling sick from unclean water, he is hospitalized, unable to access treatment, and makes the hardest decision of his life — to leave Gaza through the Rafah Crossing by paying the border guards all the money he has.
He fiercely hugs his family goodbye, clinging to blue prayer beads his father gave him. He leaves Cairo — a city pulsing with luminous malls and “people living normally” — for South Africa, which opened an ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and where the streets roar with Palestine flags and liberation chants. Among the trees and sun of South Africa, Ghunaim is resolved to return to Gaza and to rebuild.
“I left everything behind me, where I was born, where I lived, I’ve left my friends, my family, everything that I had before the Israeli occupation destroyed it. But this is not the end, it's just the beginning, and inshallah I will come back and we will build it again.”
Before October 2023, he had filmed the beauty of Gaza - the food, culture, history, with a dream of inviting people to visit Gaza, to show the love of life sustained by 2 million people trapped by the Israeli occupation in the world’s biggest open air prison. He had smiled, wearing dark glasses and a keffiyeh beneath the sun.
“We will never stop speaking about what's happening and how Palestine was in the past, because we have a history and we will have the future.”
***
Bisan echoes the footage of Ahmad Alive.
Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda films Israeli tanks forty meters away, people evacuating in droves to so-called “safe zones”, Israeli bombings of Al Nasser and Al Shifa hospitals, more than 60,000 people living inside a hospital-turned-shelter. She, too, begins her footage with proof of life: “Hey everyone, this is Bisan from Gaza, I’m still alive.” Explosions, screams, and sobbing rack her footage.
“I'm trying to find an internet connection to tell you what's happening,” she says. “It's a war against hospitals, against children, against women, against people with disabilities and injuries. People are just dying. I'm now talking to you from a dangerous place and hearing everything from my ears. They are invading the hospital. I'm still alive but I don't know if I'm surviving this night.”
She wades through ashen rubble, showing Instagram the remains of mundane life: a handbag for a party, a school notebook, a teddy bear, a rose. Beneath a shattered roof, she asks: “If these were terrorists' homes, what do your homes look like?”
She talks with a young girl who tries to protect an autumn-coloured cat, plays makeshift volleyball with kids in a dusty Rafah, films their laughter, the sea and its rainbow. She lives in a rain-doused tent in Rafah with millions, a declared safe zone that Israel then bombed.
“Behind me, tents were ruined and bombed last night as people were sleeping, they burned them alive, like literally, the Israeli army burned people alive. Look there, look at the stuff, look at the tiny sandals.”
With foreign journalists barred from Gaza, it’s her mission to document the genocide till the very end. She was nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, and her journalism — awarded a Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and an Emmy — has been viewed by over 40 million people worldwide.
She recalls a childhood in Gaza filled with joy, laughter, love, and walks along the beach “as a way of life.” She yearns to keep the beauty of Gaza alive and cherished. Before October 2023, she passionately documented stories of life, festivity, and culture in Gaza.
“I miss my life. I miss everything in my life. I miss myself,” she says. “I’m closer to death than life. If I die, if I no longer exist, just remember an entire people being killed, being exterminated on screens.”
When a surge of protests rode the tide of the student encampments for Palestine, she became certain that Palestine would be free.
"You are shouting for Palestine, you are protesting for Palestine, you are dancing, singing for Palestine, and one day, we'll recreate it for real, in Gaza, together. Thanks for each one of you because you made us, me and my people, feel that we’re free, we’re heard, and we’re going back to our home and lands. I feel it here in my head - I'm going back.”
***
“If Bisan was your sister, if Bisan was your daughter, if Ahmad was your brother - literally your brother - would you be doing the same things that you are doing now to support them?” Khaled asks the audience after the screenings of Ahmad Alive and Bisan. “There will come a time where people will look back and will say — in 2023, in 2024, in 2025, a genocide took place. In future, it will be common knowledge, it will be acceptable for us to say it was a genocide, because we’ll have commemorations and we’ll have books on this, and it will be a forgone conclusion, and people will look at you — perhaps it will be your children, perhaps it will be your family members, your grandchildren — they’ll look at you and say “where were you when that was unfolding, what were you doing when that was taking place?” And you will have to answer. And if no one asks you, your soul will ask you at that time, when it becomes fashionable to call it a genocide. It will ask you “what were you doing when genocide was unfolding in Palestine?”... Just make sure that the answer that you have - of what you did when you witnessed a genocide - is sufficient for the one asking you.”
Al-Tarhuni, who has family in Gaza right now, shared that grief and trauma have altered her.
“As we reflect on the status of our world that we live in, the world that our parents lived in, and our grandparents lived in, at times I feel very angry, and at other times I feel grief, and most of the time I feel rage. My heart keeps getting pulled into directions that I know is the direction that our oppressors want us to go through — it’s the direction of desperation. I need to remember, myself, that that’s not the path to liberation,” says Al-Tarhuni. “It is our duty to make sure that the struggles and sacrifices of our ancestors fuel our veins and keep pushing us forward, reminding us that the legacies have to live through us… Palestinians were never waiting for our charity. Palestinians have always demanded our solidarity. Do all you can in your capacity to stay in that solidarity mode. It might look different for each one of us. Each one of us has a role to play. And inshallah we will reach a point where we will see a free Falasteen in our lifetime.”
She shared a poem called “What the body remembers” by Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi, a writer and poet in Gaza who studied English literature at the now-destroyed Islamic University of Gaza.
My eyes open before the light finds the room—
outside my window the world explodes, but what scares me more
is the silence inside where estrangement blooms, like a bruise
My chest holds my scream, like a window sealed against the wind
My hands write friends’ names over and over,
as if the ink might hold them together
My fingers tremble, reaching for what’s no longer there
My teeth clench around a future I can’t bear to taste
My tongue curls around hunger, bitter as rust
My legs keep walking on blistered feet, because stopping means surrender
My mouth, once filled with laughter and bread, now tastes only ash
My chest tightens, longing for the version of me before the burning
My eyes can’t ever close, fixed on all we’ve lost
Outside, the sky’s indifferent gaze spills over what used to be a home—
no more walls, no more roof, just rubble, cradling ghosts
Inside, silence rewrites my body in a language only the broken understand
***
Thinking of the Western world’s reckoning with Srebrenica and Gaza, Khaled spoke of hypocrisy.
He noted that the genocide in Gaza was completely ignored as national delegations acknowledged July 11th as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica, a resolution approved by the United Nations only in May 2024.
On July 11th, 2024, Canada’s then-Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly issued a statement that welcomed the recognition of the Srebrenica genocide and claimed unwavering solidarity for the victims:
“We welcome the official recognition of this day as the first International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica, following a resolution approved by the UN General Assembly on May 23, 2024…We stand with the victims and survivors’ families in their ongoing fight for justice…The greatest respect that we can give to those who were killed is to work toward reconciliation and to do everything we can to prevent such a horrific crime from ever happening again.”
Current Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anandt followed suit this year.
Neither have ever issued such statements on Gaza.
“The hypocrisy was on clear display,” said Khaled. “Not one of them, not one of them, mentioned Gaza. They were able to see a genocide happen in Srebrenica but decided to forgo and overlook a genocide that is happening right now, live, on all our phones, on every major network. They chose to look the other way. That's hypocrisy, at least in my books.”
He speaks of the tremendous solidarity he feels for all oppressed people - Bosnians, Palestinians, Indigenous peoples, and everyone on the planet.
“Bosnians are my people. And not just because we share the same religion, but because they’ve been oppressed and I’ve been oppressed, and I’ve been oppressed not just because I'm of Palestinian descent and my family is in Gaza right now under the conditions that you saw. I’m oppressed because I’m a human being on this planet Earth in 2025 witnessing what’s been documented as a genocide by so many people,” he said. “Never again will I look the other way. And it doesn't matter who it happens to - whether it's those in Bosnia, those in Palestine, or definitely our First Nations peoples.”
Before the screenings, a community member recited a passage of Surah Al-Baqarah from the Quran, which shares lessons to give as much as we can to others, and Indigenous community members Elder Mary Lou Smoke and Jess Notwell sung a traditional Cherokee song to the audience “for greater peace in the world.”
Accepting offerings of tobacco, Smoke and Notwell sang in voices that were gentle, fortified, and certain, held by the pulsing rhythm of a traditional drum and a shaker rattling with beads.
Smoke spoke of the Indigenous resistance that sustained traditional teachings amidst genocide.
“Our people have suffered a great genocide in this country. On this land here, we call Turtle Island, most of it was swindled from us and a lot of our people were murdered. We were forced onto reservations, and our kids were sent to the residential schools, and we survived and our teachings survived,” said Smoke, sharing that Indigenous communities continued their persecuted ceremonies in secret. “That’s why the ceremonies, the songs, and the words are still alive today.”
Bosnian community member Elma Brakic shared a land acknowledgment before their song, adamant that her words would not be empty but a declaration of lifelong solidarity.
“As Bosnians, land acknowledgements are incredibly difficult. If those that try to erase us stood on our land and offered words of acknowledgment, while they continued to benefit from our suffering, it wouldn't feel like justice. But we still do this today because we believe in acknowledging the truth,” said Brakic.
She acknowledged the traditional lands of the Anishinabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunapawok, and Attawanderon people and the eleven First Nations communities in our region, including the Chippewas of the Thames, Oneida Nation of the Thames, and Munsee-Delaware nations.
“We don’t want these to be empty words, but instead a reminder that the systems of dispossession and genocide that affect us are still active here. Our liberation is tied to the liberation of Indigenous peoples everywhere and we honour them today not only with words, but with the commitment to stand alongside them in their fight for land, water, and sovereignty.”
***
After the screenings, some audience members asked the speakers questions.
What is a sufficient answer to what we should be doing for Gaza right now? How do we deal with rage?
Khaled believes that a sufficient answer will differ from person to person, but that silence will never do. He reminded the audience to contact representatives in government on a regular basis, to speak up and raise awareness. He gives importance to self-empowerment, such that those who stand with justice might wield more power in future — after the ceasefire, after a generation has passed — to deliver it.
“What is it that I can do given the resources that I have to move the needle even an inch?” said Khaled. “The long-term is the more difficult thing to do. There will be a ceasefire. This will stop - whether in a month or in two or three or four. It will stop. And that's when the test starts. After the genocide, when you are scrolling and the feed doesn’t have dead children with their heads cut off anymore, what will you be doing? Will you move on as well? And if you do, it means the genocide was for nothing. Give yourself 30 years - what am I going to equip myself with, change my situation in the next 30 years, to enable me to do much more than I can do today? If all I can do is write a cheque, go to a protest, talk to a representative, what can I do to change my situation so that in 30 years I can move the needle?”
Al-Tarhuni urges all to go to Palestine, sharing that having presence and bearing witness can “curb some of the atrocities” all on its own. She reconnected with her roots during her visit last summer and plans to visit again this spring, alleviating the regret that may come if her chance vanishes.
“We have passports that allow us to go to Falasteen, maybe not Gaza. I’m sad and regretful that I wasn’t able to get in and see Gaza before the genocide. And I would hate for anybody to say that about the West Bank and Al-Quds and Masjid Al-Aqsa,” said Al-Tarhuni. “I would hate for any Canadian Muslim or Arab or anti-genocide ally, for them to one day say ‘I wish I was able to go and visit’... If you have a passport that allows you to go to Falaseteen, make sure you do go to Falasteen, make sure you take your kids and reconnect with your roots and reclaim that space.”
On rage so rightful and intense that it can alienate those who struggle to understand injustice, Khaled suggested thinking of those in Gaza and how they insist on joy. He recalls the images of Bisan playing volleyball and comforting children.
“Juxtapose it to the pain and the hurt that they’re feeling. Yet they still find a way, deep down inside, to smile. They dig deep down inside and find those moments to build that strength and move forward. I do not belittle the difficulty that we're facing here to speak up and raise awareness,” he said. “But that should increase our resolve - that I'm going to go through the pain not for myself, but for Bisan, for Ahmad, and the 60,000 people, the 20,000 children that passed away. Let them not have passed away in vain.” ♦