Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina – Thousands of people lined Sarajevo’s main street Saturday to watch a funeral cortege of tractor-trailers transport 610 bodies to the site of a memorial for victims of Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.
Weeping shattered the silence as the canvas-covered trucks trundled to the front doors of the Bosnian president’s office while en route to the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
The bodies will be buried during the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the massacre Monday.
“My older son is on those trucks,” said Sabra Mujic, 64, wiping her tears. “I’m still missing my husband and my younger son. I wish they would be here together.”
Among those who paid tribute was the Bosnian Muslim member of the country’s multiethnic presidency, Sulejman Tihic.
Neither the Serb nor the Croat members of the presidency came to pay their respects.
About 8,000 Muslims, mostly boys and men, were slaughtered at Srebrenica in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb soldiers who had overrun the eastern town.
The killings in what was then a U.N.-protected zone came shortly before the end of the country’s 1992-95 war.
The bodies were dumped in mass graves across the countryside and are still being found.
Thousands are still missing.
Germany Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer on Saturday urged the detention of fugitive Bosnian Serb leaders Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic to help prevent any repeat of the massacre. The U.N. war crimes tribunal court in The Hague, Netherlands, has charged the two with genocide.
Fischer said the killing was the “gruesome climax” of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s policy of ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Croats during the Balkan wars and must not be repeated. Milosevic is in custody and facing a trial at the tribunal.
Forensic experts have found 5,000 bodies in 60 mass graves in the area of Srebrenica.
DNA sampling and other forensic methods have led to the identification of 2,079 remains.
Of these, 1,327 of have been buried at a cemetery for victims that is part of the memorial center placed in the Srebrenica suburb of Potocari.
