Thousands gather in Bosnia's Srebrenica to mark genocide
Thousands of people have converged on the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica to mark the 27th anniversary of Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Holocaust to attend the funeral of 50 recently identified victims.
As mourners from around Bosnia and Herzegovina and the world arrived in Srebrenica on Monday, families of victims reburied their loved ones and maybe find some closure after the decades-long search for their remains in mass graves scattered around the town.
Idriz Mustafic was in Srebrenica to bury the partial remains of his son, Salim, who was only 16 when he was murdered in the July 1995 massacre, along with thousands of other men and boys from the Bosniak ethnic group, which is primarily Muslim.
“My older son, Enis, was also killed; we buried him in 2005. Now I am burying Salim,” Mustafic said.
“[Forensic experts] have not found his skull, [but] my wife got cancer and had to undergo surgery. We just couldn’t wait any longer to bury the bones that we found, to at least know where their graves are,” he added.
The Srebrenica killings were the bloody crescendo of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which took place after the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalistic passions and territorial ambitions that set Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic factions – Croats and Bosniaks.
In July 1995, at least 8,000 Bosniak males from Srebrenica were separated by Serb troops from their wives, mothers and sisters, chased through woods around the eastern town and killed by those forces.
The perpetrators ploughed their victims’ bodies into hastily made mass graves which they later dug up with bulldozers and scattered among other burial sites to hide the evidence of the crime.
During the process, the half-decomposed remains were ripped apart by bulldozers so that body parts are still being found in mass graves around Srebrenica and being put together and identified through DNA analysis. Read More...
