Around 3,000 Bosnian Muslims held a solemn prayer meeting amid tight security in Serb-controlled Srebrenica yesterday to mark the fifth anniversary of the worst massacre of the Bosnian war.
The Muslims, many of them back in their home town for the first time since the devastating 1995 events, lined up in front of the former headquarters of the United Nations battalion where a group took shelter after Bosnian Serb forces overran the town.
Srebrenica was one of six towns designated by the UN Security Council in May 1993 as a "safe area", but 110 lightly-armed Dutch UN troops were powerless against a Serb onslaught on July 11th, 1995.
The Red Cross estimated that more than 7,000 inhabitants were "missing" after the attack on Srebrenica and the remains of some 4,000 were later found.
Many other men were killed when they tried to break out of the town through Serb lines. Their families say 10,000 people disappeared. UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan said the tragedy would forever haunt the world body.
Groups of women among the crowd yesterday - who arrived in a long column of buses driven through Bosnian Serb territory amid heavy security by local police and international police and troops - began wailing when they returned to the scene.
"Let them scream. We all need to scream," said 55-year-old Fahira, who said she had lost all her adult male family members in the massacre.
She earlier berated a passing UN official who turned away from the crying women, some of them crouched over in agony.
"Why turn your head? Don't turn your head. You should see our tragedy," she said. "The last time I was in Srebrenica I was here at this very site."
Mr Ismet Celikovic, one of the organisers of the ceremony, which was much larger than last year's first commemoration at the site, said the bus he came in had been stoned by Serbs in Bratunac.
A Western official said a woman had been arrested over the incident, which followed the burning of an empty Muslim house in Srebrenica overnight by unknown arsonists.
Bosnian Serbs lined the road on the way to the ceremony in silence and some children gave the three-fingered Serb salute when the buses passed but there were no other incidents.
One Serb from Bratunac said people there also felt pain from the war. "Our wounds are too recent, which is why Muslims travelling to Srebrenica across Bosnian Serb territory can't feel completely safe," said Blazenka Nogo (46). In Geneva, about 100 Bosnian Muslim survivors of the massacre, along with relatives of those killed, gathered outside the UN's European headquarters.
Mr Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of the three-person joint Bosnian postwar presidency, was among many senior local and Western officials attending the ceremony in Srebrenica. It was his first visit to the area since it became Bosnian Serb territory.
Dragutin Bjelica, a 53-year-old Serb from Bratunac, said the Bosnian Serb police lining the route should have arrested Izetbegovic for war crimes, while Dragan Bogdanovic (34) said the whole event was a "charade" that had disgusted local people.
The head of the local branch of the hardline Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), founded by Radovan Karadzic in 1990, said his party would hold a ceremony later in the day to mark the "liberation" of Srebrenica by Serb forces.
Mr Karadzic, now in hiding, was indicted in 1995 for orchestrating the capture of Srebrenica.