THE BALKANS: Commemorating Europe's worst massacre since the second World War, more than 20,000 people gathered in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, yesterday to rebury the remains of some of the more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys killed by Bosnian Serbs nine years ago.
In an emotional ceremony at the site of the slaughter, the crowd, including relatives of the 338 victims being reburied, fell on its knees in front of the coffins containing remains exhumed from mass graves dug by the Serbs to hide the killings.
Most of the people at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre mourned silently. But some women sobbed and wailed as the green coffins were lowered into graves freshly dug next to mounds containing the remains of 998 previously identified and reinterred victims.
Mustafa Ceric, the head of Bosnia's Muslim community, asked God to bring healing to the hearts of those who lost husbands, sons and brothers in the killings.
The youngest identified Srebrenica victim was 15 and the oldest 77. The victims were separated from the town's women and children by Bosnian Serb troops who hauled them away, shot them and buried them in mass graves.
Dressed in black, more than a dozen Serbian women from the Belgrade peace association, "Women in Black," stood next to the graves offering support to the Muslim widows. The killings have come to symbolise Bosnia's devastating war, which took some 260,000 lives and left half of the country's population homeless. UN and Muslim experts have so far discovered remains of about 5,000 victims in mass graves in eastern Bosnia.
Bosnia's president, Sulejman Tihic, reminded the crowd that many of the perpetrators of this crime still remained at large, and that without them facing justice, ethnic mistrust could not dissipate.
"The most important thing is the establishment of trust among the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina and we can build trust only on the basis of truth and justice," Tihic said. Bosnia remains ethnically divided after the 1992-1995 war between the country's Serbs, Muslims and Croats.
The punishment of war-criminals is seen as a precondition for reconciliation. Radovan Karadzic, the leader of Bosnian Serbs remains at large, along with his top general Ratko Mladic. Both are being sought by the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague. That court is trying Yugoslavia's former president, Slobodan Milosevic, for his alleged part in atrocities.
While Bosnia's Croats and Muslims have handed over all major suspects sought by the tribunal, the government of the Serb half of Bosnia has not. Bosnian Serb President Dragan Cavic only recently acknowledged that the Srebrenica massacre actually happened.