SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Around 300 people are gathering in the Bosnian capital to lay flowers at a monument to commemorate the more than 1,500 children who died during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

Sarajevo mayor Alija Behmen stood with officials, schoolchildren and tearful friends and parents of the dead to remember them on Europe's Victory Day _ a national holiday which commemorates the end of World War II in 1945.

Behmen said Wednesday that May 9 is an appropriate day to remember the children, as the deaths prove that nationalism and fascism were still very much alive in Europe in 1995. ''We lived with the illusion (they were not),'' he said.

Of the around 1,600 children who died, over 600 were killed in Sarajevo by snipers and from mortar shells.