Lined the Bosnian capital’s main street Sunday as a truck carrying 30 coffins passed on its way to Srebrenica, where newly identified victims of Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since World War II will be buried on the 28th anniversary of the massacre.
As the truck, covered with a huge Bosnian flag, briefly stopped in front of the country’s presidential building, members of the crowd tucked flowers into the canvas hiding the remains of victims found in mass graves and identified through DNA analysis.
“It is devastatingly sad that hundreds of victims still have not been found and that some people still deny the genocide (in Srebrenica),” said Ramiza Gandic, who came to pay her respects.
Newly identified Srebrenica massacre victims are reburied annually on July 11, the day the killing began in 1995, at a vast and ever-expanding memorial cemetery outside the eastern town.
So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been found and reburied there.
In July 1995, Bosnian Serbs overran a U.N.-protected safe haven in Srebrenica. The U.N. zone, however, was overrun by troops led by Gen. Ratko Mladic, who was eventually found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The Bosnian Serbs forces separated at least 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters, chased them through woods around the ill-fated town, and slaughtered them.
The perpetrators then plowed their victims’ bodies into hastily made mass graves, which they later dug up with bulldozers, scattering the remains among other burial sites to hide the evidence of their war crimes.
Dutch peacekeeping troops failed to act as Serb forces occupied the area, killing some 2,000 men and boys on July 11 alone.
About 15,000 unarmed residents of Srebrenica fled to the surrounding mountains, but Serb troops hunted them down and mercilessly killed 6,000 more people.
Skeletal remains of victims have been discovered at 570 locations across the country.
In 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague ruled that genocide had been committed in Srebrenica.
On June 8, 2021, U.N. tribunal judges upheld Mladic’s life sentence for genocide, persecution, crimes against humanity, extermination, and other war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The massacre has been declared a genocide by international and national courts. Still, Serb leaders in Bosnia and neighboring Serbia continue to downplay or even deny it, despite the irrefutable evidence of what happened.
