TRAVELLING COFFEE CUP MEMORIAL FOR SREBRENICA’S DEAD COMES HOME

SREBRENICA, BOSNIA: More than 8,000 traditional Bosnian coffee cups were installed as a memorial in the town of Srebrenica on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of the massacre of Muslim men and boys by Serb forces near the end of Bosnia’s war. The porcelain cups are part of a “Where Have You Been” exhibit that a Bosnian-born American artist created in 2006 and took around the world before bringing them home to stay, 25 years after Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two. “This is the place where they belong. They’re here to stay,” said Aida Sehovic, a former refugee from Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were rounded up, taken away and slaughtered after nationalist Bosnian Serb forces stormed and seized Srebrenica, a mainly

Muslim enclave that had been designated a U.n.-protected “safe area”, on July 11, 1995. Their bodies were tossed into mass graves later exhumed by U.N. investigators and used as evidence in war crimes trials of Bosnian Serb leaders. Sehovic launched her memorial exhibit in Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo in 2006 with a donation of 923 cups from Srebrenica women who lost loved ones in the massacre. She displayed traditional coffee cups and lyrics from old Bosnian folk songs to illustrate the feelings of loss and remembrance that Muslims who escaped death in Srebrenica experience during their morning coffee-making ritual. As volunteers were installing the sea of ceramic cups in a meadow next to the Srebrenica memorial centre, a tearful man filled six of the “fildzan” - traditional cups - in tribute to six relatives he lost in the massacre.