Bosnians bury 520 Srebrenica victims

The pain and sorrow that took place in July 1995 in Srebrenica erupted again on Wednesday as tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims came to bury the remains of their dear ones in Srebrenica, The Associated Press reported.

About 30,000 Muslims attended a ceremony at a memorial center in Srebrenica to mourn for 8,372 Muslim men and boys slaughtered by Serbs in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.

The coffins of the recently identified victims of the massacre, whose bodies were exhumed from several mass graves around Srebrenica, were lowered into the ground as tears flowed profusely from family and friends.

All of the mass graves containing the remains of the Srebrenica victims have not been found. When found, identification is often an issue, as remains are rarely complete.

The victims have been identified through DNA analysis, and so far 5,325 Srebrenica massacre victims found this way have been laid to rest.

Wednesday’s memorial ceremony was broadcast live on national television channels across the country.

Several thousand people, including some of the survivors marched through the hills of eastern Bosnia to reach Srebrenica for the ceremony.

Commemorative marches are organized each year to honor the Bosnians who were killed in the massacre.

At the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, Srebrenica was a mainly Muslim town in a Serb-held part of Bosnia. On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran Srebrenica, separated women and children from men, and then systematically murdered the men in mass executions. Mass graves were later found in the area.

Ratko Mladic, who is charged with overseeing the massacre by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, was arrested in Serbia in May 2011. Despite the evidence, his defense attorney plans to argue that the genocide never happened.

GJH/MHB/AS

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