ALMIR ARNAUT SREBRENICA More than 30,000 people attended a funeral yesterday for 465 newly identified victims of the worst mass slaughter in Europe since the Second World War, when 8000 civilians from Srebrenica were slaughtered 12 years ago.
As the coffins were laid in the ground, a child read out the names of the victims. The sound of dirt being shovelled on hundreds of coffins echoed through the valley, mixing with cries of mothers and widows.
The bodies were laid to rest at a memorial centre in the Srebrenica suburb of Potocari, which has a huge cemetery, a museum and a row of marble blocks on which the names of the victims are engraved.
"Only when you come here and see this field of graves, and meet the families, you start to understand the scale of the crime - genocide - that took place here 12 years ago," said Miroslav Lajcak, recently appointed Bosnia's top international official.
Srebrenica was described by former Secretary General Kofi Annan as the darkest page of UN history.
During the 1992-95 war, the United Nations declared Srebrenica - which had been besieged by Serb forces - a UN-protected safe haven for civilians, but then did nothing to prevent the massacre and expulsion.
In July 1995, Serb troops led by war crimes suspect General Ratko Mladic overran the enclave. The outnumbered UN troops never fired a shot and could only watch as Mladic's troops rounded up the entire Srebrenica population in the Dutch compound and took the men away for execution. Most of their bodies have never been found.
Mladic and the former Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, both indicted for genocide, are still in hiding. Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, attended the ceremony. She has been pressing for the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic for years.
Every year, more victims' bodies are found in mass graves around Srebrenica. DNA tests and other forensic methods have led to the identification and burial of more than 3000 victims, including yesterday's 465.
"Every year we bury a few hundred. This will go on for another decade until we find and if we find and bury them all," says Mehmed Kolenovic, 54, who survived the ordeal.
In The Hague, hundreds of people, many of them Bosnian refugees, also marked the massacre anniversary by marching silently around a square outside the Dutch parliament as the names of victims were read one by one.-AP
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