Thousands attend funerals of 1995 massacre victims

Tens of thousands of people have converged on Srebrenica for a funeral for dozens of newly identified victims of the 1995 massacre in the Bosnian town.

Remains of 71 Muslim Bosniak victims, including seven juvenile boys and a woman, were buried at the memorial cemetery on the 22nd anniversary of the crime.

They were laid to rest next to more than 6,000 other Srebrenica victims found previously in mass graves.

The youngest victim buried this year was 15, the oldest was 72.

Adela Efendic came to Srebrenica to bury the remains of her father Senaid.

“I was a 20-day-old baby when he was killed.

“I have no words to explain how it feels to bury the father you have never met,” Ms Efendic said.

“You imagine what kind of a person he might have been, but that is all you have.”

More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys died in ten days of slaughter after Srebrenica was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces on 11 July, 1995.

It is the only episode of Bosnia’s fratricidal 1992-95 war to be defined as genocide by two UN courts.

Serbs hastily disposed of the victims’ bodies in several large pits, then dug them up again and scattered the remains over the nearly 100 smaller mass graves and hidden burial sites around the town.

Every year forensic experts identify newly found remains through DNA analysis before reburial.

Most coffins are lowered into their graves by strangers, because all male members of the victims’ families had often been killed.

“I was looking for him for 20 years … they found him in a garbage dump last December,” Emina Salkic said through tears, hugging the coffin of her brother Munib. He was 16 when he was killed.

Srebrenica was besieged by Serbian forces for years before it fell.

It was declared a United Nations “safe haven” for civilians in 1993, but a Security Council mission that visited shortly afterwards described the town as “an open jail” where a “slow-motion process of genocide” was in effect.

When Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic broke through two years later, Srebrenica’s terrified Muslim Bosniak population rushed to the UN compound hoping that Dutch UN peacekeepers would protect them.

However, the outgunned peacekeepers watched helplessly as Mladic’s troops separated out men and boys for execution and sent the women and girls to Bosnian government-held territory.

Mladic is now on trial before a UN war crimes tribunal.