Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

“Srebrenica is a universal tragedy of our civilization” is doing two things at once: refusing the comfort of distance, and indicting the systems that make “never again” feel like branding rather than policy. Žbanić, a Bosnian director whose work circles the war’s afterlife, isn’t asking for Srebrenica to be remembered as a Balkan anomaly. She’s insisting it be read as a stress test the modern world failed in full view.

The word “universal” is the trapdoor. It widens the frame from one town to an entire post-Cold War order that congratulated itself on human rights while outsourcing moral responsibility to mandates, peacekeeping acronyms, and diplomatic proceduralism. “Our civilization” is even sharper: not “their history”, not “a regional conflict”, but the collective “we” that benefited from a narrative of progress and then watched a genocide unfold under the flag of international protection.

As a filmmaker, Žbanić’s intent is also aesthetic and strategic. Cinema is a machine for empathy, but it can easily turn atrocity into spectacle or statistics. Her phrasing pushes back against that flattening: Srebrenica isn’t just a memorial category; it’s an accusation about what societies normalize when bureaucracy outruns courage. The subtext is uncomfortable: if Srebrenica is “universal”, then the conditions that enabled it aren’t extinct. They’re portable - and they travel with denial, selective grief, and the political convenience of forgetting.