Bosnia bids farewell to 127 more Srebrenica victims

By Talha Ozturk and Amina Zornic

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina and BELGRADE, Serbia (AA) – Hundreds of people lined the streets of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on Saturday to bid farewell to the recently identified remains of more than 120 people murdered in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

The bodies of the 127 victims began their final journey from the central Bosnian city of Visoko on Saturday morning on a truck covered with a large national flag and laden with flowers.

As the cortege passed through Sarajevo, many onlookers could be seen openly crying. People showered the truck with flowers and prayed for the victims.

The remains were then slowly taken to the nearby village of Potocari, just northwest of Srebrenica town, where the victims will be buried on Monday, which marks the 21st anniversary of the murders.

About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed after the Bosnian Serb army attacked the UN ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica in July 1995, despite the presence of Dutch troops tasked with acting as UN peacekeepers.

The youngest victim among the 127 dead has been identified as Avdija (Emin) Memic who was 14 when he was killed. Memic will be buried along with his uncle Abdulrahman and his young cousin Halil, who was 16 when he died.

Every year, the remains of more than a hundred victims are identified and buried in Potocari village on the anniversary of the genocide.

However, hundreds of Bosniak families are still searching for missing people as a large number of victims were thrown into mass graves around the country during the Bosnian War.

Fatima Hubijar is a widow who attended Saturday’s ceremony in Sarajevo with a photo of her missing son. She was mourning with tears in her eyes, hoping to bid farewell to her son one day.

"I come here looking for him. Whenever coffins come, I come ... but I cannot do it anymore, I've gotten old," Hubijar says.

Around 8,400 people remain missing after the war, according to the Institute for Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina.