The remains of 50 victims of the Srebrenica genocide were laid to rest yesterday as thousands of people commemorated the 27th anniversary of the atrocity, which most Serbs and their leaders still refuse to recognise in ethnically divided Bosnia.
After a joint prayer, the remains of more recently identified victims of Europe’s worst massacre since World War II were buried alongside 6,671 others in a joint funeral at a memorial site, just outside the ill-fated town.
They included Samir and Semir Hasanovic, 19-year-old twin brothers of Sebiba Avdic who also lost her husband, father, another brother and several other close relatives in the atrocity.
“All I had is here,” Avdic said in tears pointing her hand towards the graves with white tombstones. Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica were killed by Bosnian Serbs forces in July 1995, after they captured the eastern town. It was an act of genocide under international law. “I cannot speak any more. I turned into a stone,” said Avdic who now lives with her daughter in Switzerland. “My pain is intense, as if only 27 days have passed not 27 years... Once I had a family, now I have nothing”, she sobbed.
The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell and enlargement commissioner Oliver Varhelyi paid tribute to the Srebrenica dead at a time when the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows “still today we cannot take peace for granted”. “It is more than ever our duty to remember the genocide of Srebrenica... to stand up to defend peace, human dignity and universal values. “In Srebrenica, Europe failed and we are faced with our shame,” they said in a statement ahead of the ceremony. The discovery of skeletal remains from the massacre have become rare in recent years, even though some 1,200 people have still not been found, according to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
A Bosnian Muslim woman, a survivor of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, reads from an Islamic prayer book near the graves of her relatives, at the memorial cemetery in the village of Potocari, near eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica yesterday. (AFP)
