After the mass funeral

July 11th 2011

An estimated 40,000 people gathered in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina on Monday to mark the 16th anniversary of Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II.

During the Bosnian war in 1995, at least 8,300 Bosnian men and boys who had sought safe heaven at the U.N.-protected enclave were killed by members of the Bosnian Serb army under the leadership of General Ratko Mladic, who is currently facing charges of war crimes in The Hague. A Dutch court recently found the Dutch government responsible for the deaths of three of the victims when Dutch U.N. peacekeepers handed the three men, who had been working on the Dutch base in Srebrenica, over to Serbian soldiers.

This year, another 613 identified bodies were laid to rest at the funeral that was part of commemorations. The youngest was 11 and the oldest 82.


Theodor Meron, the presiding judge of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), stated:
"By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity."


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