THE RAIN fell softly on hundreds of open graves and mingled with the tears of women who had gathered to bury fathers, husbands and sons. They had left home before dawn, travelling by car, bus and even by foot to this sad town in eastern Bosnia whose name will forever be remembered as the site of the worst atrocity committed in Europe since the second World War.
In what has become an annual ritual, tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims assembled on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the first day of what would become known to the world as the Srebrenica massacre.
On July 11th, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran what was supposed to be a UN-designated “safe haven”, effortlessly brushing aside Dutch troops stationed there to protect a population swollen by thousands of Muslim refugees who had fled from nearby villages. The outnumbered Dutch never fired a shot. They looked on as Serb troops rounded up the entire town, divided the men from the women and children, and took them away to be shot. Those who tried to escape through the surrounding woods were hunted down and killed. For days the lushly forested hills that circle Srebrenica rang with the sound of gunfire and screaming. Among the countless tales of horror recounted at a later war crimes trial was the case of the elderly man who was skewered to a tree by a knife and forced to eat his grandson’s entrails. “Truly scenes from hell,” said the judge, “written on the darkest pages of human history.”
More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed in just six days. After ploughing their victims into mass graves, the Serbs later used bulldozers to unearth corpses and spread the remains over a wide area to conceal what they had done.
More than 3,200 men have been buried in a memorial cemetery just outside Srebrenica following years of painstaking work to exhume and identify the remains of thousands of victims through the world’s most ambitious DNA testing project.
“I am so upset I can barely stand up,” said Zejna Ademovic (67). “I have buried 20 people in this cemetery so far and there are still more of my family to be found.” Zejna was there to bury her brother, and as his green draped coffin was borne aloft to the open grave, she helped support her distraught sister-in-law. “She lost everyone,” explained Zejna. Zejna’s brother was one of 534 newly identified victims buried during Saturday’s ceremony. The youngest laid to rest were Mehudin Alic and Izudin Alagic, both of whom were 14 years old in 1995. The oldest were Safet Osmanovic and Salih Mesanovic, who were 75.
“The world failed to act, failed to protect the innocent of Srebrenica,” US ambassador Charles English said. “The massacre was a stain on our collective consciousness,” he added, echoing the words used by US president Barack Obama in his Cairo address to the world’s Muslims last month.
British prime minister Gordon Brown described the Srebrenica killings as “an act of genocide and the darkest day in European history since the second World War . . . The world must never again sit back while genocide takes place in front of us,” Mr Brown said in a statement, urging all governments in the region to co-operate with the UN’s war crimes tribunal and arrest those responsible, most notably Serbian general Ratko Mladic who remains at large.
As the last grave was filled, mourners began to file out of the cemetery, past a marble pillar carved with Bosnian, Arabic and English versions of what has become known as the Srebrenica prayer: May grievance become hope/ May revenge become justice/ May mothers’ tears become prayers/ That Srebrenica/ Never happens again/ To no one and nowhere.