Bijeljina prosecutors probe Srebrenica Memorial Center

The District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Bijeljina has opened an inquiry into alleged financial irregularities at the Srebrenica Memorial Center in Potocari, and the summonses were delivered by the Zvornik Police Administration. For Belgrade and for Brussels this is not an accounting matter, because the institution sits at the centre of every argument about Srebrenica, including the one the United Nations General Assembly reopened with its resolution of May 2024.

26 current and former employees and associates of the centre received summonses on Friday. According to unofficial information, the case grew out of a complaint filed with prosecutors last year and is being handled by financial crime inspectors. Staff were called in for what the police describe as the gathering of information, to verify claims about allegedly unlawful spending and about individual suspicious transactions. Several outlets in Republika Srpska framed the case as suspected evasion of taxes and social contributions.

We reported earlier on the first round of summonses out of Zvornik. What has changed since is that the institution has now answered, and its director has put forward the argument he says removes the basis for suspicion.

Why does Suljagic say tax evasion is impossible?

Memorial Center director Emir Suljagic says the institution operates through the treasury of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with every payment executed directly through the treasury system and no cash flow that could be concealed. He says the centre undergoes two independent audits a year and has received clean audit opinions year after year.

The Memorial Center was beyond any suspicion in terms of its operations even before I arrived, it still is, and it must stay that way. We go through two audits a year, we operate as a state institution through the Treasury.

Under the treasury model the institution does not hold its own account in the ordinary sense, since payments are executed from the state’s single account. Suljagic also pointed out that the summonses arrived the day after the centre presented its annual Report on Genocide Denial, a document it publishes every year and one that reliably draws a reaction in Banja Luka.

This is a tactic we know well: the criminalisation of individual survivors, the criminalisation of memorial institutions, the criminalisation of remembrance itself. This is not the first time, and it will not be the last

The Memorial Center called the operation a form of institutional pressure and intimidation. Suljagic went further and described it as a settled pattern of behaviour by the entity police.

For years I have been saying that the Bosnian Serb police treat us institutionally as a threat. They demonstrate that at least once every year.

What the victims’ families are asking for

Associations of families of genocide victims have called for an urgent investigation into the questioning of Memorial Center staff. Their statement argues that the operation raises the question of pressure on people whose work is preserving memory.

Carrying out this operation causes serious concern over possible institutional pressure on people who work to preserve the memory of the genocide in Srebrenica.

The legal framework the associations invoke predates this case. With resolution A/RES/78/282, adopted on May 23, 2024, the UN General Assembly designated July 11 as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide, with an explicit rejection of denial.

The sequence behind the summonses

The order of events explains why the centre reacted as sharply as it did:

• May 23, 2024, the UN General Assembly adopts resolution A/RES/78/282 and designates July 11 as a day of remembrance for the Srebrenica genocide
• July 30, 2026, the Memorial Center presents its annual Report on Genocide Denial
• July 31, 2026, the Zvornik Police Administration issues summonses to current and former associates of the centre

The Srebrenica Memorial Center stands in Potocari, on the territory of Republika Srpska, which places it within the local jurisdiction of that entity’s police and prosecutors. That geography is also why any procedure aimed at the centre is read politically, whatever the complaint actually says. The next move belongs to the prosecutors in Bijeljina, who have yet to say whether the gathering of information will become a formal investigative step.