World leaders joined some 30,000 people today in marking Europe's worst massacre since the Second World War - the death of nearly 8,000 Srebrenica Muslims in Bosnia 10 years ago.
After a religious service, the caskets of the 610 most recently identified victims were passed in a long line from hand to hand towards the grave pits and buried.
The sound of dirt banging against the coffins and the weeping of women competed with a female voice reading out the names of the victims. Government leaders and dignitaries were among the crowd gathered to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the killings.
They began on July 11 th, 1995, when Bosnian Serb soldiers overran Srebrenica - a UN "safe zone." Outgunned Dutch UN troops watched as the men were separated from the women.
The men and boys were led off and slaughtered, and their bodies dumped in mass graves throughout eastern Bosnia. Forensics experts so far have exhumed more than 5,000 bodies, and identified 2,032 through DNA analysis and other techniques.
More than 1,300 Srebrenica victims are already buried at a cemetery that is part of the Memorial Centre. While the slaughter prompted Nato bombings of Serb positions across Bosnia that forced the Serbs to seek peace, government leaders and their representatives today acknowledged the world's failure to stop the killing - and expressed regrets in deeply personal terms.
"It is to the shame of the international community that this evil took place under our noses and we did nothing," said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "I bitterly regret this and I am deeply sorry for it."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed "solidarity" with the relatives in a message read out at the ceremony and drew parallels between the ethnic intolerance that spurred the Bosnian war and the terrorist bombings in London on Thursday that left dozens dead and hundreds injured.
"The bombers seek to provoke hatred between religions and cultures," he said. "It is our duty to humanity to ensure they never succeed."
Paddy Ashdown, Bosnia's international administrator, described Srebrenica as the "worst crime to take place in Europe in the latter part of the 20th century" - and the international community's failure to stop it as "our greatest shame."
He and other senior officials at the ceremony viewed graphic evidence of the killings - a nearby mass grave containing the jumbled bones of some 30 victims. Outside, families of the dead hoisted a huge banner that read: "Europe's shame - genocide."
The Srebrenica victims were among some 250,000 people killed in the 1992-95 war among Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. About 16,500 bodies have been exhumed from more than 300 mass graves throughout the country. The alleged masterminds of the massacre - Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander General Ratko Mladic - have been indicted by the UN tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, for genocide and crimes against humanity at Srebrenica and elsewhere.
Both are still at large. The US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, Pierre-Richard Prosper, read a message from US President George W. Bush stressing that America "remains committed" to having Karadzic and Mladic be brought to justice.
Serbian President Boris Tadic laid a wreath and stood silently before a memorial - a significant gesture given Serbia's political and military backing of the Bosnian Serbs during the war under former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Agencies