Bosnian dead re-interred eight years after massacre
Women wept as the coffins, draped in traditional Islamic green fabric, were lowered into fresh graves alongside 600 victims buried in March. The graveyard will become the biggest burial place of Muslims killed in the 1992-‘95 war.
Family members came from across Bosnia and from abroad to bid farewell to their husbands, sons and fathers in the eastern Bosnian field near where Serb soldiers divided women from the men who were to be slaughtered.
For the first time, a Bosnian Serb government delegation attended the anniversary ceremony held by a new memorial centre.
“I came here because I regard it to be my moral duty,” Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Dragan Mikerevic said.
In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces captured the predominantly Muslim town, which had been declared a UN “safe area”, and went on to kill up to 8,000 Muslims. So far, 1,000 victims have been identified by DNA analysis.
Bosnia’s top Muslim cleric, Mustafa Ceric, led the prayers, observed by local officials and foreign diplomats.
“May revenge become justice, may mothers’ tears become prayers that Srebrenica never happens again to no one and nowhere,” he said in English.
Sounds of weeping and whispers broke the silence as children and other family members read out the names of the dead.
“This is the most difficult day for me. My heart is tearing apart,” said Fatija Osmanovic, 49, who buried her husband and a brother. Each coffin held bones dug up from dozens of mass graves.
Only some 220 Muslims have so far returned to Srebrenica, now inhabited mainly by Serb refugees from other parts of the mountainous Balkan country, where roughly 200,000 people died during the conflict and many more were made homeless.
The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has accused wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre.
Both men remain at large.
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