Srebrenica, 10 years after the massacre

As the city commemorates the more than 7,000 Muslims slaughtered by Serb militias, Bosnia struggles to recover from its troubled past

By Stavros Tzimas - Kathimerini

SREBRENICA - “In the name of God / the all-merciful / the all-compassionate / we pray to almighty God / that pain will become hope / that revenge will become justice / that the tears of mothers become prayers / so that Srebrenica never happens again / to anyone, anywhere.”

The prayer of Srebrenica is carved in English, Arabic and Serbo-Croat on the tombstone of the cemetery in the village of Potucari in northeastern Bosnia, the port of the city of Srebrenica, where 1,800 Bosnian Muslims — of some 7,000 that Serb militias slaughtered on July 11, 1995, when they overran the valley — have been buried. The rest are in ravines in the Mikro Drino area and the surrounding forests, where they were executed in cold blood by the firing squads of General Ratko Mladic, now on the run.

The international community’s teams are working with locals to find other mass graves; so far they have disinterred another 520 victims, who were buried again with all due ceremony yesterday on the 10th anniversary of the genocide. The Potucari cemetery, irrefutable evidence of the massacre, is a 1-hectare expanse with a modern mosque, graves, gravestones and a small flower garden on the spot where many of the civilians were killed.

Muslims from all over Bosnia-Herzegovina and from abroad came here yesterday to pay tribute to their murdered fellow Muslims.