A NUMBER of MPs wore a white flower badge with a green centre at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday – which saw deputy leaders take centre stage.
Rishi Sunak missed his second PMQs in two weeks, something Angela Rayner told parliament had not happened since 1996.
Standing in for Sunak, Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden was among those wearing a white flower on his lapel.
Commons leader Penny Mordaunt and Home Secretary Suella Braverman were also sporting variations of the white flower badge.
The badge is the Srebrenica Flower – which is a commonly recognised symbol of remembrance for the Srebrenica genocide.
The massacre saw more than 8000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys killed over just five days during the month of July, 1995.
The small flower with a green centre features 11 petals – which represent the day the genocide started. The white colour of the flower symbolises the innocence of the victims, while the green in the middle stands for justice for the victims and survivors of the genocide.
Serb troops ploughed their victims’ bodies into hastily made mass graves which they later dug up with bulldozers and scattered among other burial sites to hide the evidence of the crime.
To this day, body parts are still being found in mass graves around Srebrenica and being put together and identified through DNA analysis.
On Tuesday, thousands of people converged on the Bosnian town of Srebrenica to mark the 28th anniversary of the genocide – which is Europe’s only acknowledged one since the Holocaust.
Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, were convicted and sentenced for genocide in Srebrenica by a UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
In all, the tribunal and courts in the Balkans have sentenced nearly 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officials to more than 700 years in prison for the Srebrenica killings.
Bosnian Serb leaders continue to downplay or even deny the 1995 massacre and celebrate Karadzic and Mladic as heroes.
