The excuses, indifference, and utter callousness that met genocide in the Balkans sounds eerily familiar in Barack Obama's Washington.

As well as representing a bloody monument to the bankruptcy of ethnic nationalism, the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica stands, or at least it ought to stand, as a sordid reminder of how the international community should not respond to mass killing. Indeed, the murder twenty years ago this month of 8,372 Muslim men and boys over the course of three days by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic was eminently preventable. Worse, the conduct of several European nations prior to the slaughter – Britain in particular – created a situation propitious to mass murder. 

Despite the continued relativism and genocide denial of some – Russia has this week vetoed a UN resolution which would have condemned the Srebrenica massacre as a 'crime of genocide' - the wars in the former Yugoslavia had a single identifiable cause: fascistic Serb nationalists who, once the writing was on the wall for communism, threw off the cloak of Marxism-Leninism and replaced materialist certainties with the grim mystique of blood and soil nationalism. For Bosnian Serb leaders the purpose of the war was straightforward: to ensure that Serbs and only Serbs lived in Serb-occupied territory. The humanitarian disaster which culminated in the Srebrenica massacred was not, as Cambridge scholar Brendan Simms puts it, "the by-product of war or civil breakdown. Rather, ethnic cleansing was the purpose of the war."

As such there was no moral equivalence between the Bosnian government and rampaging Serb nationalists, who precipitated the break-up of Yugoslavia by using the apparatus of Marshall Tito's old communist state to push their own brand of nationalistic racism – as a result encouraging Croats, Bosniaks and Slovenians to seek independence. Nor were Bosniaks killed at Srebrenica, as a number of revisionist "historians" still grotesquely claim, because they were guilty of "provoking" the Serbs (a bit like the claim that rape victims "provoke" their attackers). For the first time in Europe since the World War II, men and boys were rounded up and killed on an industrial scale simply because of their ethnicity. While Bosniak menfolk were slaughtered, concentration camps were established for the rape of young girls and women and villages were reduced to embers. In classifying the events at Srebrenica as an act of genocide, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia described the events unequivocally: 

"They [members of the Bosnian Serb army] stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity."