SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Tens of thousands of people on Monday marked the 21st anniversary of Europe’s worst mass murder since the Holocaust and attended the funeral of 127 newly-found victims.
Family members sobbed as they hugged the coffins for the last time before their loved ones were laid to rest at a cemetery next to 6,337 other victims found previously in mass graves. The youngest victim buried this year was 14, the oldest 77.
Fatima Duric, 52, buried her husband whom she last saw when Serbs overran the Bosnian enclave at the end of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.
The United Nations had declared Srebrenica a safe haven for civilians, but that didn’t prevent Serb soldiers from attacking the town they besieged for years. As they advanced on July 11, 1995, most of the town’s Muslim population rushed to the nearby U.N. compound in hopes the Dutch peacekeepers would protect them.
But the outnumbered and outgunned peacekeepers watched helplessly as Muslim men and boys were separated for execution and the women and girls were sent to Bosnian government-held territory. Nearly 15,000 residents tried to flee through the woods, but were killed.
International courts defined the massacre of more than 8,000 people as an act of genocide committed with the intent to exterminate the Muslim Bosniak population in the area.
The victims were buried in mass graves, which were dug up by the perpetrators shortly after the war and relocated in order to hide the crime. During the process, the half-decomposed remains were ripped apart by bulldozers so that body parts are still being found in more than 100 different mass graves and are being put together and identified through DNA analysis.
Victims are buried each year at the memorial center across the road from the former U.N. base where most of them were last seen alive.
Duric lost her husband as they fled with their two children through the woods and walked for days toward government-held territory.
“After all these years, his body was found. In fact, just a few bones. I am burying them today,” Duric said.
What hurts the survivors the most is the denial of the nature of the crime by Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs.
Last year, Serbia’s prime minister Aleksandar Vucic — a former radical Serb nationalist who openly supported Serb forces in Bosnia during the war — was chased away by stone-throwing protesters from the burial ceremony because he refused to acknowledge the genocide.
This year, victims’ families demanded that those who deny the nature of the crime should not come so nobody from official Belgrade or the Serb half of now ethnically divided Bosnia came. The president of the Bosnian Serb part, Milorad Dodik, told media on Monday that Serbs will never acknowledge it as genocide.
However, the leader of the Serbian opposition Liberal Democratic Party, Cedomir Jovanovic was greeted by the victims’ family members with applause as he laid flowers at the memorial. Like every year, the non-governmental group from Belgrade “Women in Black” stood quietly holding a large banner that read “Responsibility,” demanding Serbia acknowledges its role in the crimes.
The former president of the U.N. war crimes tribunal Theodor Meron and current president Carmel Agius insisted that it “must be called by its real name: genocide.”
