Bosnia marks massacre anniversary with mass burial

Hundreds of victims of the Srebrenica massacre were reburied on Monday as over 40,000 mourners looked on solemnly paying their respects on the 16th anniversary of the worst crime in Europe since the Nazi era. After a ceremony and collective prayer at the memorial centre in the eastern Bosnian town that already contains over 4,500 graves, survivors and volunteers hoisted 613 coffins wrapped in green cloth to the air and carried them to a field of freshly dug graves.
The youngest laid to rest was 11-years old and the oldest 82. Several people fainted as the names of the victims were read. Among the dead was Nezira Ibisevic just 20-years old and freshly married when she fled murderous Serb forces with her husband, Hazim Smajlovic, and brother.
As her coffin was lowered into the earth Monday, her brother Jusuf Ibisevic, who survived leapt into her grave. "May this earth not be too heavy for you sister," he said, tears pouring down his cheeks as he began shovelling earth onto her coffin. Meanwhile, the sound of dirt from hundreds of shovels hitting wooden coffins echoed around the swelteringly hot valley.
Nezira's husband's body along with about 3,000 others is yet to be found, however a plot remains next to her grave for them one day to be reunited in death. In July 1995 some 30,000 residents of mainly Muslim Srebrenica flocked to the UN military base in the Srebrenica suburb of Potocari. But when Serb forces led by recently arrested genocide suspect Ratko Mladic arrived, the outnumbered Dutch troops simply opened the gate. Serb soldiers then separated the crowd by gender and drove the men and boys to the fields. Over 8,000 men and boys were butchered over the following few days.
15,000 others almost all men, as women were bussed by the Serbs to government territory tried to escape, fleeing through the mountains in a desperate attempt to reach Bosnian government-held territory. Many were hunted down and executed Their bodies later found in mass graves. During the ceremony, officials called on Serbs both in Bosnia and in neighbouring Serbia to face the past and realise what was done in their name.
The Bosnian Serb member failed to attend Monday as has been the case for 16-years reflecting the deep division that still remains among Muslim Bosnians, Croats and Serbs who fought each other at various points of the 1992-95 Bosnian war that cost 100,000 lives and culminated with the Srebrenica massacre.