The remains of 30 victims of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been laid to rest as thousands of people commemorated its anniversary against a backdrop of surging tensions.
Twenty-eight years after they were murdered, 27 men and three teenage boys only recently identified through DNA analysis were buried at a vast and ever-expanding cemetery just outside Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia on Tuesday.
Relatives of the victims can bury only partial remains of their loved ones because they are typically found scattered over several mass graves. Such was the case for Mirsada Merdzic, who buried her father on Tuesday.
“Only very few bones of his were retrieved because he had been found [in a mass grave] near the Drina River,” she said while huddling next to a casket shrouded in a green burial cloth. “Maybe the river washed him away.”
The Srebrenica killings, Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Holocaust, were the bloody crescendo of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, which came after the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalist, territorial ambitions that set Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic populations – Croats and Bosniaks.
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serbs overran a UN-protected safe area in Srebrenica. They separated at least 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters and slaughtered them. Those who tried to escape were chased through the woods and over the mountains around the ill-fated town.
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