This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, one of the darkest pages of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this context it comes No other houses by Gabriele Santoro, a book that collects the voices of those who experienced that tragedy first hand, offering an intimate look at a wound that has never really healed.
What happened in July 1995
In July 1995, troops of the Army of the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, commanded by General Ratko Mladić, entered Srebrenica. The city had been declared a protected area by the UN, but this was not enough to stop the horror. In just a few days, over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed.
It was the largest massacre in Europe since the Second World War, the epilogue of a long series of atrocities that had already bloodied Bosnia. But it was also, at an international level, the symbol of a failure: that of the European community and the United Nations, incapable of preventing and stopping the conflict. International tribunals later ruled that it was genocide, but the political and ethnic wounds in the region remain open to this day.
The agreement that stopped the war, but did not heal the divisions
While Srebrenica marked the lowest point of the Bosnian war, the diplomatic turning point came a few months later. In November 1995, the Dayton Accords formally ended the conflict. The weapons fell silent, but peace brought with it a heavy price.
The agreement, instead of promoting reconciliation, ended up crystallizing ethnic divisions. A complicated and fragile state structure was created, reflecting — and in some ways legitimizing — the separation between communities. Thirty years later, the balance remains contradictory: if on the one hand Dayton stopped the violence, on the other it blocked any real reconciliation. Bosnia today is a politically divided country, where ethnic conflicts have not disappeared but have simply moved from the trenches to the institutions.
The ten stories of “No other home”
It is in this context that Gabriele Santoro’s book published by Del Vecchio Editore fits. No other houses. Memories along the Drina thirty years after Srebrenica it is not a historical essay nor a political analysis, but a mosaic of testimonies. Ten stories of survivors and witnesses, three different generations united by trauma and the stubborn will to move forward.
Santoro has collected the voices of those who have gone through hell and come out of it, carrying with them invisible but very deep scars. As the author writes:
There are those who survived, those who searched for the remains of their loved ones, those who returned to stay, choosing life over revenge.
They are words that contain one of the greatest challenges of the post-war period: reconciliation not only with the past, but with oneself. The testimonies that Santoro collects show people who have lost everything – family members, homes, certainties – and who have had to decide how to continue living. Some chose to stay, others to return to the places of horror, refusing to let violence have the last word.
But the book doesn’t just document the pain. Santoro also addresses the most uncomfortable questions, those that have no easy answer and that continue to torment those who lived through those years:
So what happened? Why did the war break out? How is it possible that, in a single spring or summer evening, man’s soul changed to the point of pushing him to kill those who until the day before had been part of his own world?
These are questions that resonate like a warning. They force us to deal with human frailty, with the ever-present possibility of sudden dehumanization. A transformation which, unfortunately, does not only belong to the past: we are reminded of this by the conflicts that still bloodied the world today.
Why remember, today
Thirty years after the genocide, the memory of Srebrenica remains a battlefield. There are those who deny it, those who minimize it, those who would like to move on without ever having really come to terms with the past. In Bosnia and beyond, remembering Srebrenica is still a controversial act, full of political implications.
Santoro’s work fits precisely into this debate. His research is not only historical, but raises questions that concern us all: what is the collective responsibility in the face of tragedies like this? What role did Europe have in responding — or not responding — to the massacre? And how do we deal with a trauma that continues to weigh on the shoulders of the new generations, young people who did not experience the war but still carry its weight?
Remembering Srebrenica today also means asking ourselves what Europe has become, how it can address its internal divisions and contribute to true reconciliation. The genocide cannot remain just a chapter in the history books, a distant event to be commemorated once a year.
No other houses it offers no easy consolations or definitive answers. But for this very reason it deserves to be read. Because memory, as Santoro reminds us through the voices he has collected, is not a rhetorical exercise: it is an act of responsibility and justice. It is the first step to building a different future.
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No other houses. Memories along the Drina thirty years after Srebrenica
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