BOSNIA: Thousands of relatives of 8,000 Muslim men and boys slaughtered in Bosnia in 1995 gathered yesterday to bury 600 victims of the Srebrenica atrocity.
Women and men, part of a group of about 10,000, wept while lowering coffins draped in traditional Islamic green cloths into fresh graves in an eastern Bosnian field.
It is the final resting place for those who were killed by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica on July 11th, 1995, despite the presence of UN peacekeepers.
The grave mounds, marked with green wooden panels bearing the names of the dead, covered a small section of a sprawling cemetery for all of Srebrenica's victims.
It will become the biggest graveyard of Muslims killed in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Bosnian Serbs captured the enclave, which had been declared a UN "safe area", in July 1995, as lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers stood by.
The graveyard lies near the site where Serbian forces divided women from the men who were to be slaughtered. Muslim men and women, normally separate at prayer, joined together yesterday. A visibly shaken Hodzic Aza buried a son and a brother.
"Thank God I now know where they are," she said after the burial. "I also hope to find my husband, another brother and father-in-law."