Sunday, July 12, 2009 SREBRENICA: More than 20,000 Muslims gathered in Srebrenica on Saturday for the burial of 534 newly identified victims on the 14th anniversary of the wartime massacre in the Bosnian town.In line with Islamic tradition the victims' caskets were carried by mourners from hand to hand to their graves following a prayer at a memorial cemetery just outside the eastern town.The victims' names were read out as coffins, wrapped in a green cloth, passed through the crowd and were finally buried 14 years after Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.The 534 victims were among some 8,000 Muslim men and boys who were killed by Serb forces after they captured the UN-protected enclave on July 11, 1995, and committed Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.The remains of the victims, aged between 14 and 72, were in most cases found in secondary mass graves where they had been moved from initial burial sites in a bid by Serbs to cover up war crimes."Although we were desperately searching for his remains for years it was so hard to receive a telephone call telling us that my father had been identified," said Nurveta Guster, a 27-year-old technician."I saw him for the last time at our house in Srebrenica. He left with other men through the woods trying to escape.""It is just like it is happening now, I'm going through it again," said Guster, whose uncle and a 18-year-old nephew were also buried.Hatidza Mehmedovic, who is in her 60s, is still searching for her son's remains. "Victims' families are still suffering as mass graves are still hidden," she said.The Croat and Muslim members of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, Zeljko Komsic and Haris Silajdzic, attended the ceremony along with the international community's top representative Valentin Inzko. No senior Serb official was present."We must again acknowledge that the world failed to act, failed to prevent slaughter of innocence of Srebrenica," the US ambassador to Bosnia Charles English told the mourners.British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a statement, called it the "darkest day in European history since the Second World War."The European Parliament in January proclaimed the date a day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide, calling on countries across the continent to support the move.But the atrocity was not officially commemorated in ethnically-divided Bosnia amid growing tensions with Serbs.While they admitted in 2004 that their forces killed 8,000 Srebrenica Muslims, Bosnian Serb authorities condemned the resolution, reflecting the revival of nationalist rhetoric that triggered the 1992-1995 war.In another act of defiance on Wednesday, Serb deputies in the Bosnian parliament blocked an initiative to declare July 11 the Srebrenica genocide remembrance day in the former Yugoslav republic.Bosnia's inter-ethnic war cost 100,000 lives and left the country split into two highly autonomous entities -- the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serbs' Republika Srpska.So far some 3,200 Srebrenica victims have been buried at the memorial cemetery. Forensic experts from the International Commission on Missing Persons said they have identified 6,186 of those killed in the atrocity.The victims of the slaughter were initially buried in a dozen mass graves.Bosnian Serbs sought to cover up the massacre by reburying the remains of victims using bulldozers, which caused body parts to become separated.So far, about 70 mass grave have been found and exhumed, and DNA analysis is the only tool for identification.Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, suspected of being the main culprit for the massacre, was detained last year and is awaiting trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). His army chief and co-accused Ratko Mladic is still on the run.Serbia's Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic said a criminal case "is one of the main conditions for reconciliation and the establishment of a durable peace in the region.""Our debt to the victims is to judge those who committed these crimes," Cvetkovic said in a statement for the anniversary.
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