Thousands in Bosnia commemorate 1995 Srebrenica massacre

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Fifty newly identified victims were honored and reburied, Monday, in Bosnia as thousands gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Holocaust.

Twenty-seven years after they were brutally murdered, the remains of 47 men and three teenage boys were laid to rest at a memorial cemetery at the entrance to Srebrenica, joining more than 6,600 other massacre victims already reburied there.

Idriz Mustafic attended the collective funeral to bury the partial remains of his son, Salim. He was 16 when he was killed in Srebrenica, in July 1995, while trying to flee the town as it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in the closing months of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

“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 war, which came 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, Bosnian Serbs overran a UN-protected safe haven in Srebrenica. They separated at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters, chased them through woods around the eastern 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. During the process, the half-decomposed remains were ripped apart. Body parts are still being found in mass graves around Srebrenica and are being put together and identified through painstaking DNA analysis.

ASSOCIATED PRESS A Bosnian muslim woman, Bahta Aljic, mourns next to the coffin containing remains of her husband who is among 50 newly identified victims of Srebrenica Genocide, Monday, in Potocari.