Thousands of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina have gathered to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, the worst act of mass killing on European soil since World War II, and attend the funeral of 50 newly identified victims.
More than 3,000 people attended the commemoration, which most Serbs and their leaders refuse to recognize in the ethnically divided country, at a memorial cemetery in Potocari, eastern Bosnia on Monday.
They also held the reburial of 50 victims, whose remains were found in mass graves and were recently identified through DNA analysis.
Newly identified victims are given a dignified burial each year on July 11 – the anniversary of the day the killing began in 1995. After this year’s funeral, the number of burials in the cemetery rose to 6,721.
In the last two years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only a relatively small number of survivors were allowed to attend the annual commemoration service and collective funeral of the victims in Srebrenica. But with restrictions lifted, thousands attended the service Monday, including many diplomats and dignitaries.
Addressing the commemoration ceremony ahead of the funeral, Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren apologized to the Srebrenica survivors for the Dutch peacekeepers’ failure to prevent the 1995 massacre.
“The international community failed to offer adequate protection to the people of Srebrenica and, as part of that community, the Dutch government shares responsibility for the situation in which that failure occurred and for this we offer our deepest apologies,” Ollongren said.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and EU enlargement commissioner Oliver Varhelyi also paid tribute to the Srebrenica victims.
“It is more than ever our duty to remember the genocide of Srebrenica… to stand up to defend peace, human dignity and universal values, ” they said in a statement.
On July 11, 1995, Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic.
Srebrenica’s Muslim population fled the town, which had been declared a UN “safe haven” for civilians, and rushed to the UN compound where its peacekeepers were supposed to protect them.
The Dutch peacekeepers, however, handed over the base to Serbian troops, who separated out men and boys for execution and sent the women and girls elsewhere to a territory under their control.
In less than two weeks, the Serbian forces systematically murdered more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys and dumped their bodies in numerous mass graves in an attempt to hide their crime. The victims’ remains are still being unearthed and identified.
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