LIPLJE (Bosnia): Nezira Sulejmanovic was wandering like a ghost around a muddy mass grave in eastern Bosnia on a chill rainy day in June. A tiny woman in her 50s, Sulejmanovic came hoping that her son, who went missing after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys, might be found in the grave.

“If only I could find his body, I would finally find peace,” she said weeping.

Her words express the only remaining wish of thousands of Srebrenica women who lost sons, husbands, brothers and fathers in Europe’s worst massacre since World War Two — to find the remains of their dearest and bury them in peace.

For a long time they hoped their men might still be alive. But after 10 years of uncertainty, hope has died and now they only live to find identifiable remains.

“I pray to God that a new mass grave is opened and that I find my children. I pray to find and bury them while I’m still alive,” said Hatidza Mehmedovic, who lost her husband, two sons and all her male relatives in the massacre.

“Each time I go to a mass grave, I wonder what their death was like. If I knew that they killed them quickly, half of my suffering would be gone,” Mehmedovic added.

But the grave at Nezira’s feet contained scarcely recognisable traces of human remains, in a grim mixture of bones, body parts and cloth.

The bodies, which experts say belong to victims from Srebrenica, are so mangled that not a single one may be recovered intact.

As the 10th anniversary of the massacre approaches on July 11, about 2,000 Srebrenica victims have been identified, shot by Bosnian Serb forces who overran the eastern enclave protected by Dutch UN peacekeepers.

“It took 10 years to prove that genocide happened in Srebrenica — 10 years of denial of our tragedy, of uncertainty,” sighed Mehmedovic.

The Bosnia war claimed up to 200,000 lives.

Nato powers who failed to prevent it are embarrassed by the fact that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic — the wartime Bosnian Serb political and military leaders indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague — are still at large.

Both are charged with masterminding the massacre and in recent days the West has expressed hopes that Mladic at least might be in custody before the anniversary date.

“I cannot imagine a more appropriate initiative than seeing General Mladic in The Hague before July 11,” US State Department Under Secretary Nicholas Burns said earlier this month in Belgrade, after meeting Serbian leaders.—Reuters