Hopes of justice as Srebrenica buries more victims
11 Jul 2007 13:59:37 GMT Source: Reuters
(adds Serbian president's statement, paras 8-9) By Maja Zuvela SREBRENICA, Bosnia, July 11 (Reuters) - Families of victims of the Srebrenica massacre buried 465 more victims on Wednesday, at an annual ceremony that has become the main event of their lives since the 1995 atrocity by Bosnian Serb forces. For the first time, the commemoration took place in an atmosphere of raised hopes that those responsible for the slaughter of some 8,000 Muslims 12 years ago this month would finally be prosecuted. The Bosnian Serb Army of General Ratko Mladic seized the former U.N. "safe zone" of Srebrenica in July 1995 and in the following days carried out what is considered Europe's worst war crime since World War Two. On Tuesday, the new Bosnian peace overseer Miroslav Lajcak moved to sack a senior Bosnian Serb police official and suspend 35 policemen believed to have taken part. "God grant that what was done yesterday bears fruit," said Elmana Mehic from Srebrenica, who came to bury the remains of her uncle, collected from three different mass graves. "Twelve years have passed and nobody has done anything for us." Several senior Bosnian Serb army officers have been sentenced by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague for the Srebrenica massacre, and others are being tried in Bosnia. But top genocide suspects Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic are still at large. "I'm working to get Karadzic and Mladic. I still hope that I'll get them by the end of my mandate in December," U.N. Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte told a group of Srebrenica mothers, who accused her of not doing enough to apprehend the two men. Serbian President Boris Tadic said in a statement that his country, consistently accused by del Ponte of harbouring Mladic, was committed to locate and arrest all war crimes indictees. "That is not just our international obligation, it is something we owe above all to ourselves and to our neighbours," Tadic said, paying respect to the Srebrenica victims. The Dayton peace accords which ended Bosnia's 1992-95 war split the former Yugoslav republic into two parts, a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb Republic. Srebrenica, 70 percent Muslim before the war, went to the Serbs. Muslims want self-rule for the town but the Serbs are opposed. No senior Bosnian Serb officials attended Wednesday's commemoration ceremony. NO RETURN YET "These innocent victims died because of a concept not worthy of a human," Bosnian presidency member Haris Silajdzic, a Muslim, told the gathering of thousands. "Let us do everything, all together, for this concept not to become reality, for Bosnia-Herzegovina not to be the way the perpetrators of crimes wanted it, for our country to be good for all people living in it and they themselves worthy of that name," Silajdzic said. In his last ruling before handing over to Lajcak this month, former peace envoy Christian Schwarz-Schilling put the memorial complex in Potocari near Srebrenica under Bosnian state protection. Srebrenica families said that was fine as far as it went, but complained that the same people who killed their relatives were still wearing the uniforms of the Bosnian Serb police and guarding the tombs of the victims. Now they seem more hopeful. "Lajcak did a fair thing for us, the victims ... after all these years," said Mirnesa Sinanovic, 21, who came to bury the remains of her father. But she said that her family were not yet ready to go back to their old home near Srebrenica. "Until we feel safe and secure, we will not return," Sinanovic said.
