Newly identified victims of Srebrenica massacre arrive for anniversary burial

Remains were found in mass graves and identified through DNA analysis

A women prays in Visoko, Bosnia, next to a lorry carrying coffins holding the remains of Srebrenica genocide victims. AP

The remains of 30 victims of the Srebrenica massacre will be buried on Tuesday.

A lorry carrying coffins drove through Sarajevo on its way to Srebrenica, where the newly identified victims of Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Second World War will be buried on the 28th anniversary of the massacre.

The lorry, covered by a large Bosnian flag, stopped briefly in front of the country’s presidential building. People tucked flowers into the canvas.

More than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys – separated from their wives, mothers and sisters – were chased through woods around Srebrenica and slaughtered in 1995.

The remains of these victims were found in mass graves and identified through DNA analysis.

“It is devastatingly sad that hundreds of victims still have not been found and that some people still deny the genocide,” said Ramiza Gandic, who came to pay her respects.

Each year newly identified victims are reinterred on July 11, the day the killings began in 1995, at a vast and expanding memorial cemetery outside Srebrenica.

So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been found and reburied.

A peace march began on Saturday from Nezuk, through the forests in eastern Bosnia, in memory of the victims.

The 100km march retraces the route taken by the Bosniaks who were slaughtered. Almost 4,000 people joined this year’s march, organisers said.

“I come here to remember my brother and my friends, war comrades, who perished here,” said Resid Dervisevic, a massacre survivor who took the route in 1995. “I believe it is my obligation, our obligation to do this, to nurture and guard [our memories].”

Osman Salkic, another Srebrenica survivor, said, “Feelings are mixed when you come here, to this place, when you know how people were lying [dead] here in 1995 and what the situation is like today.”

The Srebrenica killings were carried out during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which came after the break-up of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalistic passions and territorial ambitions. Bosnian Serbs tried to form their own state that would have encompassed Serbia.

Bosnian Serbs fought the country’s two other main ethnic populations – Croats and Bosniaks.

More than 100,000 people died before the war ended in 1995 in a US-brokered peace agreement.

The massacre has been declared a genocide by international and national courts.

But Serb leaders in Bosnia and neighbouring Serbia have tried to play down the massacre.

The wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and former military commander Ratko Mladic were sentenced to life in jail by a UN war crimes court in The Hague for orchestrating the genocide.