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Bosnia marks 20 years since Srebrenica, still digging for the dead

By REUTERS

JULY 11, 2015 13:35

Tens of thousands gathered at a cemetery near Srebrenica in Bosnia on Saturday to mark the 20th anniversary of Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, still tortured by voices of denial and the ongoing search for the dead.

Abandoned by their U.N. protectors toward the end of a 1992-95 war, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces over five July days, their bodies dumped in pits then dug up months later and scattered in smaller graves in a systematic effort to conceal the crime.

More than 1,000 victims have yet to be found.

The bones of 136 newly identified victims will be interred beneath marble gravestones in the Potocari memorial cemetery in eastern Bosnia, in what has become annual ritual as the graves are discovered.

A U.N. court has ruled the massacre was genocide. Many Serbs dispute the term, the death toll and the official account of what went on - reflecting conflicting narratives of the Yugoslav wars that still feed political divisions and stifle progress toward integration with Western Europe.

Milorad Dodik, president of Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic where Srebrenica is located, last month called the massacre "the greatest deception of the 20th century."

Serbia, which backed Bosnian Serb forces with men and money, was represented by Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, fresh from enlisting ally Russia to veto a U.N. resolution last week that would have condemned the denial of Srebrenica as genocide.

A former disciple of the "Greater Serbia" ideology that fueled much of the bloodshed of Yugoslavia's demise, Vucic has rebranded himself as pro-Western, embracing Serbia's ambitions of joining the European Union, which depend partly on the pursuit of regional reconciliation.

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