Some 50,000 survivors, guests and dignitaries gathered yesterday at the site of Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II to mark the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica slaughter and to bury the newly identified bodies of 610 victims.
The sound of Muslim prayer echoed through the valley as family members wandered between the 610 caskets laid on the ground of the Memorial Center ready to be buried.
"They killed my entire life and the only thing I want now is to see the guilty ones pay for it," said Fatima Budic, 60, as she wept next to the coffin of her son Velija, who was only 14 when he became one of the nearly 8,000 victims of the slaughter. Her husband Ohran and another son, who was 16, have never been found.
Shortly before the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the town's population fled to the UN compound after Bosnian Serb soldiers overran Srebrenica -- a UN-protected zone. However, the Serb soldiers entered the camp and began a slaughter that left 8,000 Muslims dead, most of them men and boys. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves throughout eastern Bosnia. Dutch UN troops did nothing to prevent the massacre.
Forensics experts so far have exhumed more than 5,000 bodies, 2,032 of which have been identified through DNA analysis and other techniques. More than 1,300 Srebrenica victims are already buried at the cemetery which is part of the memorial center.
Apart from the survivors and local guests, the anniversary is being attended by presidents of countries in the region and by foreign ambassadors -- including the architect of the peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke.
The alleged masterminds of the July 11, 1995, massacre -- Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, General Ratko Mladic -- have been indicted by the UN tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, for genocide and crimes against humanity at Srebrenica and elsewhere. Both are still at large.
"This is an extremely important and sad event," the President of the UN tribunal, Theodor Meron, told reporters. "Its dimensions resonate with the events of the Second World War and this definitely qualifies into the category of genocide," he added.
Asked about the Mladic and Karadzic, he said that he is "sure that their day in the Hague won't be before long. I'm quite optimistic."
A high-ranking official from neighboring Serbia-Montenegro was expected to attend the service -- a significant gesture given Serbia's political and military backing of the Bosnian Serbs during the war.
Srebrenica was brought back into focus in June when footage -- recorded by Serb troops -- was broadcast worldwide showing Serb paramilitaries executing six Muslim men from Srebrenica. The footage showed that Serbs, and not just Bosnian Serbs, had taken part in the slaughter.
"I am going to Srebrenica to pay tribute to the innocent victims of the crime committed there," Serbian President Boris Tadic said. "It is necessary to establish full trust and cooperation in the region. We have to break the circle of evil on the Balkans."
Other officials attending were members of Bosnia's three-person presidency, Bosnia's international administrator, Paddy Ashdown and the head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz.
On Sunday evening hundreds of survivors who took part in a three-day memorial death march arrived in Srebrenica, having retraced the route some took to Muslim-controlled territory and freedom in 1995. Some 250,000 people were killed in the 1992-95 war between Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs.
About 16,500 bodies have been exhumed from more than 300 mass graves throughout the country.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this