THOUSANDS OF people are gathering in Srebrenica today to mark 16 years since Europe’s worst massacre since the second World War, amid warnings that political deadlock between Bosnia’s Muslims, Serbs and Croats could lead to a return to violence.
Coffins containing 613 recently identified victims of the atrocity, which claimed the lives of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys, will be buried today in the presence of relatives who have travelled from around the world to be there.
Several thousand people have completed a three-day, 110km “peace march” to Srebrenica on a mountain route Muslims used to escape the massacre in 1995.
One of them, Himzo Hodzic, said many of those taking part were shocked by the stories of survivors, who were often ambushed, shot at and shelled by Bosnian Serb troops led by Ratko Mladic.
“Some say they can’t imagine what I’m describing,” he said, “others just walk and cry.”
Mladic is finally on trial at the United Nations court at The Hague alongside his wartime political boss Radovan Karadzic, but their long-awaited capture has not brought reconciliation between Bosnia’s communities; the men are seen as heroes by many Bosnian Serbs.
Crowds of people, some carrying flowers and photographs of the dead, gathered in Sarajevo on Saturday to watch lorries loaded with coffins making their way towards Srebrenica. Hundreds of massacre victims are identified each year from remains regularly found in mass graves – a result of Serb forces having used bulldozers to dig up bodies after burial and reburying them at different sites in a bid to hide their crimes.
“Srebrenica is the deepest wound for the Muslims of Bosnia. It is a stain on the conscience of the international community and a stain on the conscience of those who committed this crime,” said Bosnian-Muslim political leader Bakir Izetbegovic as the cortege passed through Sarajevo.
“Justice will never be done in this world. Karadzic and Mladic have been arrested, but hundreds of others [who committed war crimes] will save themselves in this world. Only God will see that justice is done,” Mr Izetbegovic added.
The complex political system created to help end the 1992-1995 war is now paralysed by disputes between the Muslim, Serb and Croat parties which have left Bosnia without a government for the last nine months, causing the country’s worst crisis since the killing stopped.
One half of Bosnia, the so-called Muslim-Croat Federation, broadly supports western-backed plans to strengthen the Bosnian state. However leaders of the Serb-run half of the country threaten to seek independence rather than cede powers to the central government in Sarajevo.
Tension is now being stoked by calls from members of the main ethnic-Croat parties for a new entity in which Croats would run their own affairs without Muslim interference.
The impasse prompted the International Crisis Group to warn recently that violence is a “real prospect . . . in the near future unless all sides pull away from the downward cycle of their maximalist positions”.
