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More than 2,000 Sarajevo residents and members of the Srebrenica victims’ association gathered at the Bosnian presidency building on Tuesday to meet trucks which had brought the remains of the 409 victims from a cemetery in the nearby town of Visoko.
Families of those who died carried pillowcases embroidered with the names of their lost loved ones and placards with pictures of victims of the massacres in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces attacked Srebrenica.
The remains of the victims will now be taken to the Potocari memorial centre near Srebrenica, where they will be reburied on the 18th anniversary of the massacres on July 11.
The ceremony was attended by the Bosniak and Croat members of the tripartite Bosnian presidency, Bakir Izetbegovic and Zeljko Komsic, as well as a large number of politicians, former Bosnian Army generals and ambassadors.
Izetbegovic said that 18 years after the genocide, it was time for everyone in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region to admit to the crimes which happened in Srebrenica.
“What to say today, when we are looking at a convoy carrying remains of babies, fathers of murdered children… I hope the time has come to admit the truth about this crime,” said Izetbegovic.
“Only through the truth can we arrive at reconciliation. I hope that Bosnia will finally adopt a resolution about Srebrenica, just like other civilized countries,” he said.
Izetbegovic was referring to the fact that the Bosnian state parliament has never adopted any resolution condemning the massacres because lawmakers from all three ethnic groups cannot agree on whether or not to use the term genocide, with Bosnian Serb MPs rejecting this description of the killings.
Meanwhile the chairman of the Bosnian parliament’s house of peoples, Denis Becirovic, said that he hoped all those responsible for the crimes committed in Srebrenica would be brought to justice.
“There is no nation guilty of crimes, only individual criminals. I hope that as a society we will have the courage to prosecute all those who took part in this,” said Becirovic.
Eighteen years ago, military and police forces from Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Republika Srpska attacked the UN-protected ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica, and subsequently killed around 7,000 men and boys and forcibly removed around 30,000 women, children and elderly people.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, has defined the crimes in Srebrenica as genocide in several of its verdicts.
The ICTY and the Bosnian state court have so far handed down prison sentences totalling more than 500 years for war crimes in Srebrenica.
There are several ongoing trials over the genocide, including the prosecutions of the political and military leaders of Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
