More than 3,000 Bosnian Muslims, guarded by US peacekeepers, prayed in a meadow near Srebrenica yesterday for thousands of compatriots killed by Serb forces in Europe's worst atrocity since the second World War.
US troops and local Serb police were out in force along the road to Srebrenica and near the old battery factory in the suburb of Potocari, where a lightly-armed Dutch UN force watched helplessly in July 1995 as Muslim men and boys were separated from their families and led away by Bosnian Serbs.
Eight thousand Muslims were reported missing and are presumed to have been killed by Serbs, either in cold blood or as they tried to flee Srebrenica after nationalist Serb forces overran it, despite its wartime status as a UN "safe area".
As the mourners set off, NATO peacekeepers were deployed to deter possible assaults by Serbs. At the last minute, the convoy of about 80 buses was rerouted to avoid the centre of the post-war Serb town of Bratunac - on the main road to Srebrenica - where some 100 people gathered. Along the road, some Serbs gave their nationalist three-finger salute.
In the meadow across from the battery factory, about 3,100 mourners, many of them women and elderly, prayed and unveiled a foundation stone for a memorial centre that will be established alongside a graveyard for the victims' remains.
Mustafaefendi Ceric, the head of Bosnia's Islamic community, said his people had gathered to pray so that the atrocities of Srebrenica would never happen again.
He said Serbs risked having to assume collective guilt for crimes committed in Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war as long as they could not come to terms with what was done in their name and indicted war criminals remained free.
"There should not be collective guilt but you should also not hide criminals behind the people," he said.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Mr Radovan Karadzic and military commander Gen Ratko Mladic, indicted by the UN war crimes court for the Srebrenica massacre, are believed to be hiding in the mountainous wilds of Serb-run eastern Bosnia.
Srebrenica, an overwhelmingly Muslim town before July 1995, is now populated almost totally by Serbs, many of them refugees from areas now in Bosnia's post-war Muslim-Croat federation.
The remains of some 4,500 Srebrenica victims stored in the nearby town of Tuzla - in Bosnia's Muslim-Croat half - will be buried in a meadow near the town after undergoing DNA tests to try to identify them. Two hundred more were unearthed just this month.