BOSNIAHERZEGOVINA Many massacre victims still not IDd 25 years later
SREBRENICA, BosniaHerzegovina — A quarter of a century after they were killed in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, eight Bosnian men and boys will be laid to rest Saturday in a cemetery just outside of Srebrenica — their marble gravestones joining thousands more, each with the same month and year of death.
Over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims perished in 10 days of slaughter after the town was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in the closing months of the country’s 199295 fratricidal war. Their executioners tried to ensure they would never get the sort of memorial Srebrenica holds every year. Their bodies were plowed into hastily made mass graves and then later dug up with bulldozers and scattered among other burial sites to hide the evidence of the crime.
But, since 1996, Bosnian and international scientists have slowly unlocked what was once described as the “biggest forensic puzzle anywhere in the world,” unearthing the bones from those gruesome death pits and connecting them with the names of the people to whom they belonged.
When the remains are identified, they are returned to their relatives and reburied in the Potocari memorial cemetery. And each year on July 11, the anniversary of the day the killing began in 1995, relatives gather for a funeral of the recently identified. Most of the dead were men and boys, so most of the mourners are women — mothers and sisters, daughters and wives.
Massacre survivor Fazila Efendic will attend the collective funeral this year to witness her sisters in grief bury a handful of bones, as she once did.
Having a grave to visit will bring them some relief, Efendic says. Her husband, Hamed, and her only son, Fejzo, were killed in the massacre.
For years, every time a new mass grave was found, she rushed to the site hoping to see something she would recognize as having belonged to her loved ones.
“There are no words to describe the sorrow you feel when you are looking for (your loved ones) bone by bone,” Efendic said. “I visited every newfound mass grave; I’ve seen the inside of every one of them.”
All of Hamed’s remains were found in two mass graves, one unearthed in 1998 and the other in 2000. Fejzo — or rather two of his leg bones — was found in another one several years later. Efendic buried her husband at Potocari after his remains were found but waited years before finally deciding to do the same with Fejzo’s partial remains. Sabina Niksic and Eldar Emric are Associated Press writers.