VISOKO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Flowers tucked on its side, a blue truck carried coffins with the remains of seven newly identified victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica on their final journey through Bosnia to be buried on the 30th anniversary of Europe’s only acknowledged post-World War II genocide.
Dozens of people in the Bosnian town of Visoko paid their respects on rainy Wednesday morning as the truck departed in a convoy toward the capital Sarajevo, where it stopped on its way to Srebrenica. Hundreds of people lined up the streets, putting flowers on the truck or just standing in silence.
“This is teaching the younger generation and not forgetting,” said the top international official in Bosnia, High Representative Christian Schmidt.
More than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed in Srebrenica in July 1995, after Bosnian Serb fighters overran the small eastern Bosnian town during the final months of the war. The bodies were dumped in mass graves around Srebrenica and later reburied multiple times to hide evidence of the crimes.
The seven victims who were recently identified were found in different locations over the past years.
The U.N. General Assembly last year adopted a resolution to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide on the July 11 anniversary.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that the United Nations and the world failed the people of Srebrenica — a U.N.-declared safe zone during the war — not as a result of “an accident of history” but because of “policies, propaganda, and international indifference.”
The conflict in Bosnia erupted in 1992, when Bosnia’s Serbs took up arms in a rebellion against Bosnia’s independence from the former Yugoslavia and with an aim to create an own state and eventually unite with neighboring Serbia. More than 100,000 people were killed and millions displaced before a U.S.-brokered peace agreement was reached in 1995.
Bosnia remains ethnically split while both Bosnia’s Serbs and neigboring Serbia still refuse to acknowledge that the massacre in Srebrenica was a genocide despite rulings by two U.N. courts. Scores of Bosnian Serb political and military officials have been convicted and sentenced for genocide.
Newly identified Srebrenica massacre victims are reburied every July 11 at a vast and ever-expanding memorial cemetery outside the eastern town. Thousands of people are expected to mark the anniversary on Friday at the Potocari memorial complex near Srebrenica.
