Thousands of grieving Bosnian Muslims buried hundreds of newly-identified victims of a notorious Balkan war massacre and expressed hope justice would finally be done now that Serb commander Ratko Mladic is on trial.
Survivors and relatives of the dead wept in scorching heat at the scene of the Srebrenica atrocity, where the remains of 613 Muslim men and boys shot and bulldozed into the earth by Bosnian Serb forces 16 years ago were being buried.
The bodies were only recently identified from mass graves.
"Having him (Mladic) behind bars brings some comfort but the true relief will come only once I find the body of my 18-year-old son who was sent to death by Mladic," said Munira Subasic, a member of the Mothers of Srebrenica group.
Serb troops overran the eastern town, declared a United Nations safe haven, on July 11, 1995 and went on a week-long killing spree in nearby woods as a lightly-armed Dutch U.N. battalion protecting the town stepped aside.
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Mladic was arrested in neighbouring Serbia in May, after years in hiding, and handed over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal. He and his political master, Radovan Karadzic, are on trial for genocide over Srebrenica and the 43-month siege of Sarajevo. Both have denied all charges.
Subasic said she had begged Mladic to spare her son as his soldiers separated men from women, children and the elderly. "He promised he would but did not keep the promise. I wish him a long life in prison to pay for this," she said.
Subasic said she hoped a legal case brought by Srebrenica survivors against the Dutch state, now before that country's supreme court, would finally be resolved. "This will be yet another step forward in our fight for the truth," she said.
An appeals court ruled last week that the Dutch state was responsible for the deaths in Srebrenica of three Bosnian men whose families had filed a legal case.
If confirmed by the supreme court, the ruling paves the way for financial compensation and similar legal action from other Srebrenica survivors.
MANY SERBS STILL DENY MASSACRE
Hamida Nuhic, whose sons, aged http://content.sbs.com.au/redback/Naca_Nacaarticle/index/db/naca08/table/article/siteId/1/gr//rbsmid/134/id/new11 and 15, were the youngest victims buried on Monday, said the war crimes trials in The Hague were taking too long.
"The (Hague) court should stop their charade and... speed up the trials so we see the justice served while we live," Nuhic said as tears ran down her cheeks and Muslim prayers echoed across the green valley.
Hundreds of men then passed green-draped coffins from hand to hand towards the graves. The coffins contained only bones, painstakingly identified by DNA analysis.
After the massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, Serbs dumped the victims' bodies into mass graves. They were later dug out with bulldozers and removed to different sites in an attempt to cover up the crime.
The International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) has so far identified 6,598 Srebrenica victims and 4,524 of them have been buried in a memorial graveyard after being unearthed.
Most Bosnian Serbs, who now live in a loose union with the Muslims and Croats, deny the massacre. They say the deaths were a part of the conflict and still view Mladic as a hero, refusing to observe the day of national mourning.
In Serbia, ultranationalists have launched a campaign to mark what they call "The day of liberation of Srebrenica."
