Thirty years after the Srebrenica massacre, ‘never again’ is an old and empty slogan

A Bosnian Muslim woman mourns next to the grave of her relative, a victim of the Srebrenica genocide - (AP)

When an exiled South African journalist reluctantly explained the Holocaust to his seven-year-old son, the boy knew that no adult in Germany could have legitimately claimed “we did not know”.

That boy grew up to cover two back-to-back “official” genocides in the 1990s, in Bosnia and Rwanda. In the former Yugoslavia he saw Muslims hunted for sport in Sarajevo and whole streets curtained to hide civilian shoppers from Serb snipers.