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Srebrenica, Bosnia: Relatives finally got the chance on Friday to bury 308 Bosnian Muslim men killed when Bosnian Serbs overran Srebrenica thirteen years ago.
The relatives, most of them women, knelt by the coffins and prayed wordlessly, palms turned heavenwards. The coffins, wrapped in green cloth, were neatly lined up on a grassy field under the noon sun.
There is enough room here for all 8,000 victims of the 1995 massacre but more than a third are still missing, their bones lying in undiscovered mass graves, or in bags and boxes in a lab, awaiting identification.
The mass burial of newly identified victims, once a year on the anniversary of Srebrenica's fall in the last months of the 1992-95 war, has become a central part of Bosnian Muslim identity, a chance for remembrance and family reunions.
The air is filled with sobs, greetings and the smell of thyme.
"This day is even more difficult for me because I have found the body of one of my children but I cannot bury him," said Hatidza Mehmedovic, 56, who lost her husband and two sons.
The body of one son was found in 1998 but partially identified only last year. DNA analysis however cannot show which one of the two it is. Only three bones have been found of her husband's body. The massacre started on July 11, 1995, when UN troops protecting Srebrenica during a 3-year siege stepped aside and allowed Bosnian Serbs to take over, separate the town's men and boys and stage a week-long killing spree.
The bodies were first buried in mass graves, then dug out with bulldozers and moved to smaller graves to hide the crime. A victim's remains can be scattered in several locations, and are not released for burial until two-thirds of the body have been recovered.
"The bodies of these 308 people have been found in as many as 55 different locations," said Amor Masovic, the member of the Commission for Missing Persons. "Some of them had been found in the ground nearly 13 years ago."
The massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, weighs heavily on Bosnia, a country divided emotionally and politically into Serb and Muslim-Croat regions.
"Genocide occurred here. This fact cannot be minimised, it cannot be evaded and cannot and must not be denied," said US Ambassador in Bosnia Charles English.
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