Ten years of Srebrenica massacre

Bosnians grieve, West regrets Srebrenica massacre
By Daria Sito-Sucic and Maja Zuvela1 hour, 23 minutes ago
Families buried the remains of Srebrenica victims on Monday on the 10th anniversary of the massacre and the West acknowledged its failure to prevent Europe's worst atrocity in 50 years.
Thousands of men formed long rows, passing the 610 green-draped coffins one by one above their heads to freshly dug graves where women in white headscarves waited by wooden markers, many weeping or silently praying.
Each narrow, cylindrical box was tagged with a number and a name. Each was light, containing only bones painstakingly identified by DNA analysis. Each family buried its own, shifting the sodden earth with shovels, buckets or by hand.
The dead had lain for years in hidden pits where they were flung by Bosnian Serb troops in July 1995 after the systematic slaughter of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys taken from what was supposed to be a U.N.-protected "safe area."
"Srebrenica was the failure of NATO, of the West, of peacekeeping and of the United Nations. It was the tragedy that should never be allowed to happen again," said former U.S. Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke.
Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic and his political master Radovan Karadzic are indicted for genocide for the atrocity. Both remain at large.
President Bush sent condolences to Bosnia on behalf of the American people, saying the Srebrenica atrocity remained a source of pain for all who believed in the dignity of human life.
"We also remain committed to ensuring that those responsible for these crimes face justice, most notably Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic," he said in a statement.
A message from U.N Secretary-General Kofi Annan repeated that Srebrenica would haunt the world body forever. Some 400 lightly armed Dutch troops guarding Srebrenica's Muslims were swept aside by Bosnian Serb forces while the United Nations rejected appeals for air strikes by NATO to halt their advance.
"The victims had put their trust in international protection. But we, the international community, let them down," said a message from European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana. "This was a colossal, collective and shameful failure."
MORE AWAIT BURIAL
"The truth cannot be forgotten, it cannot be denied. The evil must be spoken about for the evil not to be forgotten," said Mustafa efendi Ceric, Bosnia's chief Islamic priest.
Srebrenica, once a bustling Muslim-majority town, today is a dismal shell in the Serb Republic half of Bosnia. From a pre-war population of 36,000 only 9,000 live there now, most of them Serbs. The only visitors are those who tend to the graves.
Yet the evidence of massacre has little influence on those Serbs who insist any killing was simply a hard fact of war or who deny the massacre even happened -- despite a Bosnian Serb report last year acknowledging the mass killings.
Although Bosnia declared Monday a day of national mourning, its Serb Republic said it was "not informed" and largely failed to observe it. In Serbia, only a few private channels offered live television coverage of the ceremony.
Serbian President Boris Tadic attended the memorial and laid a wreath, ignoring Serb nationalists who objected, saying he should honor Serb war dead instead.
A choir opened the ceremony with the mournful "Srebrenica Inferno" as families sought out the final resting places of their fathers, husbands and sons. All of the Muslims among an estimated 40,000 mourners turned to Mecca and knelt for prayers.
"Our pain continues, every year we come to bury someone else," said Hajrija Mujic, who was burying her father-in-law. Her husband's remains were identified too late for burial today.
The massacre, in the final months of a 43-month war that claimed 200,000 lives, aimed to ensure there were no Muslims to fight back or reclaim Serb-occupied land or homes in the future.
Monday's funerals raise the number of identified and buried victims to about 2,000. There are 7,000 body bags with remains still to be identified and 20 more mass graves await excavation.
(Additional reporting by Nedim Dervisbegovic in Sarajevo)