Bosnians mark 12th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre

By Zdravko Ljubas Jul 11, 2007, 14:53 GMT

Sarajevo/Srebrenica - Carried first from hand to hand, in accordance with Muslim tradition, green felt-covered caskets with remains of 465 victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica were buried Wednesday in the nearby Memorial Center Potocari.

More than 30,000 people attended the funeral and commemoration in Potocari to mark the 12th anniversary of the massacre in the former eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, in which Bosnian Serb troops killed up to 8,000 Muslim men after capturing the area on July 11, 1995 during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The 465 victims were buried in the Memorial Center Potocari next to nearly 2,500 victims of the massacre who had been exhumed, identified and buried since the memorial was opened in 2003.

The youngest victim buried Wednesday in Potocari was Sadik Huseinovic, who was only 13 when he was massacred.

His brother Adam, who was then 16, and father Avdo were also buried Wednesday in Potocari, one next to another.

A total of 19 men of Ahmetovic family were also among 465 victims buried in Potocari, as well as 17 of Hasanovic family and 15 of the Alic family.

Sead Alic, 29, came to Potocari for the funeral of his brother Senad, 21, and uncles Dzevad, 48, and Nedzad, 46.

'My brother and uncles were arrested. We were searching for them, searching for truth about them. We found the truth about them last year, in a mass grave,' said Sead.

The bodies of his relatives, he said, were buried although not all their remains had been recovered.

'Once we find the rest of their mortal remains, we will bury them too,' said Sead.

Twelve-year-old Almir Alic, Sead's nephew - the only child of his late brother Senad, was only 21 days old when his father was killed.

'I do not remember my father, but now I know where his grave is,' said Almir.

Clouds and occasional rain did not prevent thousands of people from joining in a prayer led by Bosnia's Muslim religious leader reisu-l-ulema Mustafa Ceric.

'We should pray that sadness become hope, that justice replaces revenge, and that the mother's tear be a prayer for the tragedy of Srebrenica to happen never again,' Ceric said.

Nothing except for justice could heal the pain of those who lost their dearest in Srebrenica, he said.

Many local and international officials arrived to Srebrenica to attend the commemoration in Potocari, including the UN War Crimes Tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.

The international community's High Representative to Bosnia, Slovak diplomat Miroslav Lajcak, also attended the commemoration.

He said he felt it was his duty to pay respect to the victims of the worst atrocity in Europe since the World War Two.

Just a day before the 12th anniversary Lajcak imposed a number of rules to help Bosnia's law enforcement agencies to catch and prosecute those responsible for the Srebrenica massacre.

He ordered the Bosnian Serb police to take passports and travel documents from 93 persons under investigation of possible involvement in war crimes or support to war criminals' supporting networks.

The number includes 35 Bosnian Serb police officers who were, by Lajcak's decision, immediately suspended.

All of the sanctioned persons were from so-called Srebrenica List, containing names of 810 people suspected of being linked with the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica.

In honour to all victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina's central government, the Council of Ministers, declared Wednesday a day of national mourning.

Meanwhile Bosnian forensic experts started the exhumation of the bodies of the Srebrenica victims from a newly-found mass grave in Budak, near the memorial centre.

Several dozen bodies are expected to be found in the grave, according to the Bosnian Commission on Missing Persons.

The remains of an unknown number of victims exhumed from more than 60 mass graves discovered in the Srebrenica area during the last decade, and currently packed in more than 5,000 bags, are still awaiting identification and proper burial.

The Srebrenica massacre took place while the entire enclave was under the protection of the United Nations as a 'UN safe zone.'

But while more than 30,000 women, children and elderly people were expelled from the area by the Bosnian Serb forces, some 8,000 Muslim men were massacred while a UN contingent of around 150 Dutch soldiers nearby took no action.

Soon after troops led by Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic captured Srebrenica, the Dutch UN troops left the area, leaving the local Muslim population at the mercy of the Bosnian Serb soldiers.

Less than seven years later, the Dutch government of the then prime minister Wim Kok resigned following criticism over the Dutch troops' failure to prevent the bloodshed.

The survivors of the massacre sued the Dutch government and the UN, seeking few billions US dollar compensation and moral satisfaction for their failure to protect the population of the enclave.

Early in 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that genocide was committed in Srebrenica in July 1995, accusing the wartime Bosnian Serb authorities for that.

The masterminds of the massacre, Karadzic and Mladic, remain at large nearly 12 years after The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted them for war crimes and genocide.