Today, 10 years after they were massacred, Srebrenica will rebury some 570 of its dead.
Patient forensic work has so far identified 2,000 of perhaps 8,000 victims of Europe's worst atrocity since the second World War, genocidal killings that Judge Fouad Riad described to the International War Crimes Tribunal as "truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history".
Among those present today at the international commemoration at the Potocari memorial centre in Srebrenica will be Serbian President Boris Tadic, an important acknowledgment of Serbian military complicity in the killings, although many of his compatriots remain in denial. And the hunt for the two most senior indictees, Gen Radko Mladic and former Srpska president Radovan Karadzic, goes on.
Yet while the world mourns with Srebrenica it is crucial too that it acknowledges a broader culpability. Much has been written about the bureaucratic failures of the UN whose tiny Dutch contingent watched on, unable itself to act, and unsupported by headquarters, as Srebrenica's men were marched off to almost certain death. That tragic impotence was the direct product of a yawning gulf between the pious resolutions of the Security Council and any real will on the part of member states to implement those fine words. The absence of means on the ground was no accident.
In 1999, in a UN report on the massacre, a painfully honest personal and institutional mea culpa, Secretary General Kofi Annan warned that "The cardinal lesson . . . is that a deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorise, expel or murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary means, and with the political will to carry the policy through."
He urged member states to engage in a real debate about such issues as "the gulf between mandate and means; the inadequacy of symbolic deterrence in the face of a systematic campaign of violence; the pervasive ambivalence within the UN regarding the role of force in the pursuit of peace, and an institutional ideology of impartiality even when confronted with attempted genocide . . ."
"In the end, the only meaningful and lasting amends we can make to the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina who put their faith in the international community is to do our utmost not to allow such horrors to recur."
As the UN prepares this autumn to debate reshaping itself to face the future they are words that must be heeded. The world community must give the UN the ability to act. The dead of Srebrenica demand it of us.