There was a sharp wind coming off the East River when the crowd began gathering outside the UN. Old diplomats shuffled closer to the heaters; families from Bosnia pressed together, clutching scarves and photographs. They were there to watch the unveiling of a marble flower, deceptively simple, white petals circling a green Centre built to remember the men and boys murdered in Srebrenica three decades ago.

Munira Subašić, who lost more relatives than she can easily count, spoke in a voice that carried farther than the microphones. She didn’t recite figures or legal classifications. She talked about names and how children had been killed because of the ones they carried. Her grandson, Karim, a shy and tired traveler, stood beside her. He wouldn’t say much later, only that everyone in his class had lost someone and that it was better not to bring it up.

What struck me most wasn’t the ceremony itself but the silence that followed each speech. Even UN officials, usually eager to recite pre-approved lines, seemed to choose their words more carefully. Amina Mohammed warned that denying the genocide is a habit that has been gaining new followers and was a kind of moral vandalism, a violence of its own. The memorial sits close to another reminder of the UN’s history of failure: the flame dedicated to Rwanda’s dead. Two catastrophes, two continents, a few metres apart. The symbolism requires no narration.