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Bosnian Genocide Survivors
Bury Dead at Srebrenica
Mon July 11, 2011 12:06pm GMT
By Maja Zuvela
SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (REUTERS) - Thousands of grieving
Bosniaks on Monday
buried hundreds of newly-identified victims of a notorious
Balkan war massacre and expressed hope
justice would finally be done now that Serb commander Ratko
Mladic is on trial.
Survivors and relatives of the dead wept in scorching heat at
the scene of the Srebrenica atrocity, where
the remains of 613 Muslim men and boys shot and bulldozed into
the earth by Bosnian Serb forces 16years ago were being buried.
The bodies were only recently identified from mass graves.
"Having him (Mladic) behind bars brings some comfort but the
true relief will come only once I find
the body of my 18-year-old son who was sent to death by Mladic,"
said Munira Subasic, a member of
the Mothers of Srebrenica group.
Serb troops overran the eastern town, declared a United Nations
safe haven, on July 11, 1995 and went
on a week-long killing spree in nearby woods as a lightly-armed
Dutch U.N. battalion protecting thetown stepped aside.
Mladic was arrested in neighbouring Serbia in May, after years
in hiding, and handed over to the U.N.war crimes tribunal. He and
his political master, Radovan Karadzic, are on trial for genocide
overSrebrenica [and several other towns in Bosnia] and the 43-month
siege of Sarajevo. Both have denied
all charges.
Subasic said she had begged Mladic to spare her son as his
soldiers separated men from women,
children and the elderly. "He promised he would but did not keep
the promise. I wish him a long life in
prison to pay for this," she said.
Subasic said she hoped a legal case brought by Srebrenica
survivors against the Dutch state, now
before that country's supreme court, would finally be resolved.
"This will be yet another step forward in
our fight for the truth," she said.
An appeals court ruled last week that the Dutch state was
responsible for the deaths in Srebrenica of
three Bosnian men whose families had filed a legal case.
If confirmed by the supreme court, the ruling paves the way for
financial compensation and similar
legal action from other Srebrenica survivors.
MANY SERBS STILL DENY MASSACRE Hamida Nuhic, whose sons, aged 11
and 15, were the
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youngest victims buried on Monday, said the war crimes trials in
The Hague were taking too long.
"The (Hague) court should stop their charade and... speed up the
trials so we see the justice served
while we live," Nuhic said as tears ran down her cheeks and
Muslim prayers echoed across the greenvalley.
Hundreds of men then passed green-draped coffins from hand to
hand towards the graves. The coffinscontained only bones,
painstakingly identified by DNA analysis.
After the massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two,
Serbs dumped the victims' bodiesinto mass graves. They were later
dug out with bulldozers and removed to different sites in an
attempt
to cover up the crime.
The International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) has so
far identified 6,598 Srebrenicavictims and 4,524 of them have been
buried in a memorial graveyard after being unearthed.
Most Bosnian Serbs, who now live in a loose union with the
Bosniaks and Croats, deny the massacre.They say the deaths were a
part of the conflict and still view Mladic as a hero, refusing to
observe the
day of national mourning.
In Serbia, ultranationalists have launched a campaign to mark
what they call "The day of liberation of
Srebrenica."
(Reporting by Maja Zuvela; Editing by Zoran Radosavljevic and
Barry Moody)
