SREBRENICA (Bosnia), July 11: Families buried the skeletal remains of Srebrenica victims on Monday at the 10th anniversary of the massacre and the West acknowledged its failure to prevent Europe’s worst atrocity in 50 years. Thousands of men formed long rows, passing the 610 green-draped coffins one by one above their heads to freshly-dug graves where women in white headscarves waited by wooden markers, many weeping or silently praying.

Each narrow, cylindrical box was tagged with a number and a name. Each was light, containing only bones painstakingly identified by DNA analysis. Each family buried its own, shifting the sodden earth with shovels, buckets or by hand.

The dead had lain for years in hidden pits where they were flung by Bosnian Serb troops in July 1995 after the systematic slaughter of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys taken from what was supposed to be a UN-protected ‘safe area’.

“Srebrenica was the failure of the Nato, of the West, of peacekeeping and of the United Nations. It was the tragedy that should never be allowed to happen again,” said former US Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke.

A message from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan repeated that Srebrenica would haunt the world body forever. Some 400 lightly armed Dutch troops guarding Srebrenica’s Muslims were swept aside by Bosnian Serb forces while the UN rejected appeals for air strikes by Nato to halt their advance.

More await burial: “The truth cannot be forgotten, it cannot be denied. The evil must be spoken about for the evil not to be forgotten,” said Mustafa Effendi Ceric, Bosnia’s chief cleric.

Srebrenica, once a bustling Muslim-majority town, today is a dismal shell in the Serb Republic half of Bosnia. From a pre-war population of 36,000 only 9,000 live there now, most of them Serbs. The only visitors are those who tend to the graves.

Yet the evidence of massacre has little influence on those Serbs who insist any killing was simply a hard fact of war or who deny the massacre even happened.

Although Bosnia declared Monday a day of national mourning, its Serb Republic said it was “not informed” and largely failed to observe it. In Serbia, only a few private channels offered live television coverage of the ceremony.

A choir opened the ceremony with the mournful “Srebrenica Inferno” as families sought out the final resting places of their fathers, husbands and sons. Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic and his political master Radovan Karadzic are indicted for genocide for the atrocity. Both remain at large.

“The failure to arrest them is a great failure which we all regret. They must be caught,” said Holbrooke. —Reuters