The remains of nineteen victims of the Srebrenica genocide in eastern Bosnia were laid to rest on Sunday during celebrations for the 26th anniversary of the massacre which continues to divide deep in the country, a quarter of a century after the end of the war.
Several thousand people attended the funeral at the Potocari Memorial Center, near Srebrenica, where 6,671 victims of the massacre now lie, including 435 adolescents.
236 other victims are buried in different cemeteries.
In July 1995, five months before the end of the Bosnian War (1992-95), Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and adolescents in the Srebrenica area.
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"I'm going to bury my brother's skull, and it's not even complete,"
Azir Osmanovic told reporters, shortly before the burial of the remains of his brother Azmir, who was 16 in July 1995. Fleeing Srebrenica with a group of teenagers, Azmir found himself in a minefield.
“My brother and two other boys died there
,
”
Azir said. His remains were recently found and identified
. “I decided to bury him this year, to have at least one place where I can pray for him. I think that after all these years nothing can be found, ”
he explained.
A young woman, who was 24 at the time, as well as another 17-year-old teenager are among the buried victims.
After a tribute ceremony and collective prayer, the coffins, covered with a green cloth and a wartime Bosnian flag, were carried by men to the new graves dug among thousands. perfectly aligned white stelae.
More than a thousand victims wanted
Most of the victims of this massacre had been detained, then shot in the hundreds and buried in dozens of mass graves by Bosnian Serb forces, who captured the town on July 11, 1995.
“It's more and more. difficult to find new mass graves, while more than a thousand victims are still being sought,
”says Almasa Salihovic, spokesperson for the Memorial Center.
This massacre was qualified as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The former political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were sentenced to life imprisonment, notably for this crime.
But the Srebrenica massacre is still played down by political leaders of the Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia, who refute the characterization of genocide.
"There was no genocide,"
Serbian member of the Bosnian collegiate presidency, Milorad Dodik, said on Saturday.
"There are elements according to which these coffins are empty (...) we just put a name"
, he added, quoted on the site of the television of the Serbian entity of Bosnia.
Confronting "the roots of hatred"
"It's terrifying,"
commented the director of the Bosnian Institute for the Missing, Amor Masovic.
"Here, in the memorial center, there are victims of whom only one bone was found (...) and often the remains were found in two, three or even five different mass graves".
During the few months following the massacre, the victims had been dug up with bulldozers and moved to other mass graves, in order to cover up the crimes. Serbian ministers in the central Bosnian government opposed a day of mourning in the country on Friday.
On Saturday, EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell and Commissioner for Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Olivér Várhelyi urged political leaders in the Balkans to confront
"the roots of hatred that led to genocide ”. “There is no place in Europe for genocide denial, revisionism and the glorification of war criminals
,
”
they said.