Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina – Some 20,000 people gathered Monday at the Potocari memorial near Srebrenica, for harvest in memory of the victims of the slaughter perpetrated in this region of eastern Bosnia, sixteen years ago by Serb forces Bosnia.
“No words can explain the inexplicable and irrational Evil, an unbounded hatred people whose only crime was being Muslim,” the Muslim member of the collegial presidency of Bosnia, Bakir Izetbegovic.
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“Over time, the other wounds healed well, but never Srebrenica,” said the leader of the Bosnian Muslims before the burial of remains of 613 victims of slaughter, the most important role in Europe since World War II .
Some 8,000 Muslim men, adolescents and adults were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, within days. This killing was described as genocide by international justice.
Izetbegovic said, however, that the Balkans were “leaders finally ready to confront the past.”
Muslim leader welcomed the fact that Serbian President Boris Tadic had fulfilled the promise last year in Srebrenica to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the slaughter, to arrest Ratko Mladic, former commander of the Bosnian Serbs.
“Sixteen years ago a genocide was committed in Srebrenica Europe (…) A crime that he never thought he could play on its soil” after the atrocities of the Second World War, for his part said the Croatian president, Ivo Josipovic.
“But we saw that evil at that time was stronger than human memory,” he added.