THOUSANDS gathered in Srebrenica on Tuesday to mark the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II, with some relatives of the victims giving their loved ones a proper burial for the first time. The remains of 71 victims of the bloodshed, which has been ruled as genocide by international courts, were laid to rest in a joint funeral at a memorial cemetery in Potocari, near Srebrenica. They included a 33-year-old woman and seven people who were under 18 when they were killed.

Adela Efendic said she had come to “finally say goodbye” to her father Senaid, who was 35 when he was killed. “His remains were found nine years ago in a common grave, but only a few bones,” the 22-year-old said, her head covered with a violet veil and tears streaming down her cheeks. “We were waiting, hoping to find more, but nothing turned up ... We decided to bury him now so his bones find peace,” said Efendic, who was just 20 days old when her father died.

Bosnian Serb forces captured the eastern Bosnian town, a UN-protected enclave at the time, on July 11, 1995, five months before the end of Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war. In the following days they summarily killed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

So far the remains of 6,429 Srebrenica victims have been buried at the memorial site and 233 in other cemeteries, according to Bosnia’s institute of missing people. The remains of more than 1,000 other victims have yet to be located. The victims were found in about 80 mass graves, the last of which was discovered in December 2015. Among the identified victims were 22 women and about 440 children less than 18 years old when they were killed, according to the institute.

In 2016, a UN tribunal found Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic guilty of genocide over his role in the atrocity and sentenced him to 40 years in prison. Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb wartime military chief, is awaiting a verdict by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in November. Bosnian Serbs and Belgrade refuse to acknowledge the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide, despite urgings from a handful of Serbian opposition leaders and prominent human rights organisations.

Published in Dawn, July 12th, 2017