More genocide victims to be buried on 27th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre
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SREBRENICA (Bosnia and Herzegovina) • Thousands of people were expected to attend yesterday's commemorations of the 27th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, which most Serbs and their leaders still refuse to recognise in ethnically divided Bosnia.
The remains of 50 more recently identified victims of Europe's worst massacre since World War II were to be buried alongside 6,671 others in the cemetery of the memorial centre.
Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys from the eastern town of Srebrenica were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, an act of genocide under international law.
The European Union's top diplomat Josep Borrell and enlargement commissioner Oliver Varhelyi paid tribute to the Srebrenica dead at a time when the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows "still today we cannot take peace for granted".
"Russia's unjustified and unprovoked aggression against Ukraine has brought back a brutal war to our continent," they said in a statement.
"The mass killings and war crimes we see in Ukraine bring back vivid memories of those witnessed in the war in the Western Balkans in the 1990s. It is more than ever our duty to remember the genocide of Srebrenica... to stand up to defend peace, human dignity and universal values. In Srebrenica, Europe failed and we are faced with our shame."
The discovery of skeletal remains from the massacre has become rare in recent years, even though some 1,200 people are still missing, according to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The identification process has been made more difficult by the bulldozing up of the remains and their removal to mass graves in a bid to conceal the extent of the slaughter.
Mass funerals of those identified are held each July 11, the date of the takeover by the forces of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, who has been jailed for life for war crimes.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
