United in grief, Bosnia marks Srebrenic anniversary

THE 18th Sarajevo Film Festival stopped in its tracks at noon ­yesterday in sweltering heat as the actors, producers and ­directors who have flocked to the war-scarred Bosnian capital marked the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

Instead of premiering films, the giant screen above a red carpet which stretches out from the city’s National Theatre like a scarlet exclamation mark, scrolled hundreds and hundreds of names of those killed 17 years ago to the day in the small eastern Bosnian town.

In the only incidence of genocide to have occurred in Europe since the Holocaust, an estimated 8,100 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic. This week he is standing trial for his alleged crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, having been on the run for 16 years.

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“I don’t care what happens any more. There is no verdict that could bring back my son,” said Sefika Menakic, 56, whose 15-year-old son Adem was killed as he tried to escape through the hills after Dutch peacekeepers abandoned the town – designated a United Nations’ “safe haven” – to Mladic’s Bosnian Serb forces.

Srebrenica’s anniversary, the trial of Mladic and the Sarajevo Film Festival are all part of the legacy of the war that tore apart Bosnia from 1992-5.

Bosnia and Europe are still coming to terms with what ­happened at Srebrenica, helped by such acts of remembrance, the pursuit of justice and clear signs of progress. All concerned remain firmly aware of the horrific past.

“We must never forget the act of genocide that was committed in Srebrenica, nor should it ever be denied.

“On this occasion it is important to reflect and reaffirm the conviction that the world must act to prevent such atrocities from taking place,” said Prime Minister David Cameron.

America’s president Barack Obama said that Srebrenica “will forever be associated with some of the darkest acts of the 20th century,” and added that the US “rejects efforts to distort the scope of this atrocity, rationalise the motivations behind it, blame the victims, and deny the indisputable fact that it was genocide.”

Another 520 victims of the massacre were buried yesterday in the enormous graveyard at Potocari that sits outside Srebrenica, with an estimated 30,000 people flocking to the scorching valley in eastern ­Bosnia for the commemoration ceremony.

Using DNA-inspired technology, nearly 6,700 Srebrenica victims, exhumed from mass graves, have so far been identified, their remains being returned to their families for burial.

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Enormous advances in world-class forensic science, pioneered by the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons, have established the brutal facts. This is making it even harder, say analysts, for revisionist historians and deniers of genocide to say that the massacre never happened.

Across Europe, in the Hague, Mladic’s trial on charges of genocide is another way in which the past is finally being confronted.

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