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'My heart is wounded': Rukija's husband was killed in the Srebrenica genocide 30 years ago

'My heart is wounded': Rukija's husband was killed in the Srebrenica genocide 30 years ago

SBS Australia12-07-2025
Rukija Avdić cries as she recalls the night 30 years ago when her family and home were torn apart.
It began with shouts.
Run, run! The Serbian army has entered! Srebrenica is falling! Run! Avdić calls it "that catastrophe" — the massacre of around 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was the largest mass killing in Europe since World War Two. Among the dead was Avdić's husband and twin brother. "I don't know which was worse, losing my brother or my husband," she tells SBS News.
"My heart is wounded."
Rukija Avdić cries as she looks at photos of husband and brother who were killed in Srebrenica. She says around 40 members of her extended family were killed during the war. Source: SBS News She last saw them on 11 July 1995 when Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić entered the small mountain town, which was then a United Nations safe zone. Mladić's soldiers were later found by a UN war crimes tribunal to have carried out the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims — known as Bosniaks — who were the majority ethnic group in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time.
In 2017, Mladić was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The fall of Srebrenica Recalling the moment the town came under attack, Avdić says, "there were screams and cries". "My husband wasn't with me at that moment. I was alone with my four children and my mother. "When I saw and heard the screams, I ran down the stairs and quickly grabbed the children. I thought they were going to burn us alive." Avdić says she heard Mladić shouting and telling people to leave for nearby Potočari. On her way there with her children, she stopped near her uncle's home.
"When night fell, my husband appeared. He wanted to see where I was, to see the children, to say goodbye. My brother was there too," Avdić says.
My husband said: 'Rukija, please, take care of yourself. Here, take this ring from my finger. Take care of the children. We may never see each other again. May Allah help you.' "My brother said too: 'Dear sister, I know you're my twin, I can't live without you, but I have to. "He gave me his prayer beads and his prayer mat. He was very religious." Avdić says her husband and brother then fled to hide from Mladić's troops. "The kids screamed and cried: 'Daddy, daddy, come back!' He turned and walked into the forest. But they were ambushed there. The army was waiting for them. They were prepared." Along with tens of thousands of other Bosniak women and children who lost husbands, fathers, brothers and sons, Avdić was put on an evacuation bus and forcibly displaced.
After a night in Potočari, she recalls the chilling words of the man who to this day remains in prison in the Hague as a war criminal.
Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic on the second day of his trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands in 2012. Source: SBS News / AP "Mladić came and spoke. I saw him, heard his voice," Avdić says. "He said… 'Kill, kill, only if it's a male child, kill him.' "I panicked. I took my headscarf and wrapped it around my son Jusuf, put him in girls' clothes. I did the same with Halid, dressed him in traditional girls' pants, so they would think they were girls. "Halid was two; Jusuf around five years old. They were all so little." Avdić remembers witnessing massacres with her own eyes. "When I passed through Potočari, I saw our men. They were all bound, naked. And I heard the gunshots. I witnessed a huge number of our men killed. But I still had hope that [my husband] would return. That he would come back and bring joy to his children."
For five years, Avdić and her four young children lived in tents. They moved into an abandoned home in central Bosnia before coming to Australia in 2000.
Refugees in the Tuzla camp, after being displaced from Srebrenica and surrounding Bosniak villages. Source: Getty / Patrick Robert - Corbis/Sygma via Getty Images Remains found decades later Like many of the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of Srebrenica, it wasn't until decades after the "catastrophe" that Avdić found out what happened to the men in her family. In 2012, she received confirmation that her husband's remains had been found. "It was terrible. We were heartbroken," she says. "My father-in-law told me I had to come to bury him. That was the hardest part."
Two years earlier, she had also buried her twin brother.
Every year, more and more bodies are found. Even after 30 years, many haven't been identified. It was also difficult for children left fatherless by the genocide to bury fathers they hardly remembered. Avdić says her son broke down seeing his father's coffin, though he was only six when he last saw him. "When he lowered it, he screamed. He pulled his own hair out. In that moment, he nearly went mad," she says.
"He wanted to gather four stones to bring them back to Australia for his sisters, his brother, and himself to have something to remember that day by. To never forget it. It was very hard for them."
Victims of the Srebrenica genocide are buried at the Memorial Center in Potocari, Bosnia. Source: AAP / Darko Bandic/AP War and the collapse of Yugoslavia The armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina broke out three years before the genocide, in 1992, amid the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina were one of six social republics that made up the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia declared independence from the bloc. Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence the following year, not wanting to remain in a country that would thereafter be run by Serbia, the largest of the republics, and its nationalist leader Slobodan Milošević.
For centuries, Serbs, Croats and Muslims across the socialist bloc lived together but when Yugoslavia collapsed, fighting broke out between the ethnic groups.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian-aligned armed forces launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the majority Muslim population, with the aim of establishing the Bosnian Serb Republic. What became known as the Yugoslav Wars resulted in an estimated 140,000 deaths, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice. An estimated 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian War alone — most were Bosnian Muslims. The Bosnian capital Sarajevo was under siege for nearly four years, while Bosniak villages in the east, near the border with Serbia, came under attack and mass killings of Muslims were reported from 1993.
Thousands were sent to concentration camps, where there were reports of killing, torture and starvation.
Malnourished Croatian and Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war in Manjaca, the largest Serbian concentration camp, 1992. Source: Getty / Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Avdić says she had been living "a good life" in the town of Osat, about 20km east of Srebrenica, until war came to her doorstep. She was pregnant with her fourth child at the time. "There were barricades, we couldn't get to town," she says. "I went into labour alone at home. I gave birth by myself. It was very hard." The years of conflict leading up to the genocide were traumatic for Avdić. "I remember the grenades the most, the fear. Then my husband went to the front line, because he had to protect Srebrenica, to defend the town. I was always afraid that someone would come to the door to take the children. "In 1993, when I was at home, a grenade fell close to me, maybe five metres away. I was holding my child in my arms. And then I lost my hearing. The grenade damaged my left ear."
Avdić was among the tens of thousands of people who left their homes for Srebrenica believing it to be safer.
But the enclave was frequently shelled. According to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serb forces controlled the access roads and impeded the supply of international humanitarian aid, such as food and medicine, into the town. The UN declared Srebrenica a safe zone in April 1993 and days later called for a total ceasefire in the town, deploying United Nations Protection Forces. Troops rotated and Dutch peacekeepers were on duty when the Srebrenica genocide began to unfold.
They were not permitted to use force except in self defence and were later found to have been partly responsible for some of the deaths in Srebrenica.
'No peace without justice': The war crimes tribunal Atrocities were reported from the start of the collapse of the Yugoslav Republic in 1991, and in response, the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993. The tribunal's task was to prosecute those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law. Australian lawyer Graham Blewitt AM, who had in the early 1990s prosecuted Australians believed to have participated in Nazi war crimes, went to the Hague in 1994 to become the deputy prosecutor for the ICTY, a post he held for a decade. "There were reports coming in daily of massacres and atrocities being committed throughout the Balkans," Blewitt tells SBS News. When he arrived, the ICTY had barely started its work and he was responsible for setting up the tribunal. "It was left to me to start recruiting and to set up the office," he says.
"I relied on my experience both doing the Nazi war crimes work and my work at the National Crime Authority to design the prosecutor's office."
Graham Blewitt (front right), with the judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1994. Credit: Supplied Once set up, Blewitt says they started investigating and prosecuting war crimes. "It was a lot of pressure … the tribunal could not fail because if it did, it would set back the initiatives that were taking place then to establish a permanent international criminal court. "By November [1994], we had already issued our first indictment, which kept the judges very happy." Blewitt says while his team were "up to [their] necks" investigating many other atrocities that had already occurred, he distinctly remembers hearing reports that "something terrible" had occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995.
"Within a few days, the reports started to gather momentum and it became very clear that there was something very serious happening in Srebrenica," he says.
At that stage, we had no idea that it was going to turn into a genocide. But we realised it was serious enough that we needed to get a team on it straight away. Blewitt says he pulled people from other teams and formed a special investigation unit, which began gathering evidence. With assistance from the US, the team sourced aerial imagery of mass grave sites, determining the location of victims who had been executed. "Once the Serbs found out that we were aware of the grave sites … they started to remove the bodies from those graves, took them to more remote locations and buried the bodies in secondary graves," Blewitt says.
"We were able to identify both the primary grave sites and the secondary sites, and we decided to carry out exhumations of the bodies in those grave sites."
LISTEN TO
SBS English
05/08/2024 07:19 English The ICTY's investigations quickly established that Mladić and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić were primarily responsible for the killings and took steps to indict them. "Towards the end of 1995 after Srebrenica happened, it was quite clear there was a genocide, and the international community set up peace talks in Dayton [Ohio]," Blewitt says. But there was concern a peace treaty might see Karadžić and Mladić evade accountability, so the ICTY issued their indictments in November.
"Our view was that you can't have peace without justice and they were the primary persons responsible for the genocide, so they had to be prosecuted."
Defining genocide Both Karadžić and Mladić were found guilty of war crimes and genocide in 2016 and 2017 respectively and handed life sentences. They remain in prison in the Hague. In 1999, then Serbian president Slobodan Milošević was charged with a total of 66 counts of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes across Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, becoming the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal.
Milošević was found dead in his cell in the Hague while on trial in 2006.
Graham Blewitt holding the indictment for the Slobodan Milošević, then the Serbian President, in 1999. Credit: Supplied The ICTY determined the mass killings of Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica constituted the crime of genocide. "Just looking at the definition of genocide, that there has to be the intent to destroy in whole or in part a political, ethnic, or religious group," Blewitt says.
"Looking at Srebrenica, what the Bosnian Serbs were trying to do and in fact did do, was to kill all the men and boys from Srebrenica, and there were thousands of them.
In our view that met the criteria for the definition of genocide and that then led to the charge genocide being brought. The tribunal ultimately indicted a total of 161 individuals. "[All of them were] either arrested, stood trial, some were convicted, some were acquitted, some died. But at the end and certainly in my point of view it was a complete and utter success," Blewitt says.
"Something I'm very proud of being able to have been involved in."
Remembering the victims Commemorations are being held around the world this week, including in Potočari, Bosnia, and by Australia's Bosniak community. Kissing the photos of her husband and brother, Avdić says it's important to tell their stories, so future generations know what happened in Srebrenica. "It's for my children, and my grandchildren," she says. "Because my heart, it can never be young again. It destroyed my best years, my youth. I was only 29 years old."
This story was produced in collaboration with SBS Bosnian.
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UK launches first sanctions in new strategy to deter migrant crossings
UK launches first sanctions in new strategy to deter migrant crossings

News.com.au

time2 days ago

  • News.com.au

UK launches first sanctions in new strategy to deter migrant crossings

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'My heart is wounded': Rukija's husband was killed in the Srebrenica genocide 30 years ago
'My heart is wounded': Rukija's husband was killed in the Srebrenica genocide 30 years ago

SBS Australia

time12-07-2025

  • SBS Australia

'My heart is wounded': Rukija's husband was killed in the Srebrenica genocide 30 years ago

Rukija Avdić cries as she recalls the night 30 years ago when her family and home were torn apart. It began with shouts. Run, run! The Serbian army has entered! Srebrenica is falling! Run! Avdić calls it "that catastrophe" — the massacre of around 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was the largest mass killing in Europe since World War Two. Among the dead was Avdić's husband and twin brother. "I don't know which was worse, losing my brother or my husband," she tells SBS News. "My heart is wounded." Rukija Avdić cries as she looks at photos of husband and brother who were killed in Srebrenica. She says around 40 members of her extended family were killed during the war. Source: SBS News She last saw them on 11 July 1995 when Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić entered the small mountain town, which was then a United Nations safe zone. Mladić's soldiers were later found by a UN war crimes tribunal to have carried out the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims — known as Bosniaks — who were the majority ethnic group in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time. In 2017, Mladić was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The fall of Srebrenica Recalling the moment the town came under attack, Avdić says, "there were screams and cries". "My husband wasn't with me at that moment. I was alone with my four children and my mother. "When I saw and heard the screams, I ran down the stairs and quickly grabbed the children. I thought they were going to burn us alive." Avdić says she heard Mladić shouting and telling people to leave for nearby Potočari. On her way there with her children, she stopped near her uncle's home. "When night fell, my husband appeared. He wanted to see where I was, to see the children, to say goodbye. My brother was there too," Avdić says. My husband said: 'Rukija, please, take care of yourself. Here, take this ring from my finger. Take care of the children. We may never see each other again. May Allah help you.' "My brother said too: 'Dear sister, I know you're my twin, I can't live without you, but I have to. "He gave me his prayer beads and his prayer mat. He was very religious." Avdić says her husband and brother then fled to hide from Mladić's troops. "The kids screamed and cried: 'Daddy, daddy, come back!' He turned and walked into the forest. But they were ambushed there. The army was waiting for them. They were prepared." Along with tens of thousands of other Bosniak women and children who lost husbands, fathers, brothers and sons, Avdić was put on an evacuation bus and forcibly displaced. After a night in Potočari, she recalls the chilling words of the man who to this day remains in prison in the Hague as a war criminal. Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic on the second day of his trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands in 2012. Source: SBS News / AP "Mladić came and spoke. I saw him, heard his voice," Avdić says. "He said… 'Kill, kill, only if it's a male child, kill him.' "I panicked. I took my headscarf and wrapped it around my son Jusuf, put him in girls' clothes. I did the same with Halid, dressed him in traditional girls' pants, so they would think they were girls. "Halid was two; Jusuf around five years old. They were all so little." Avdić remembers witnessing massacres with her own eyes. "When I passed through Potočari, I saw our men. They were all bound, naked. And I heard the gunshots. I witnessed a huge number of our men killed. But I still had hope that [my husband] would return. That he would come back and bring joy to his children." For five years, Avdić and her four young children lived in tents. They moved into an abandoned home in central Bosnia before coming to Australia in 2000. Refugees in the Tuzla camp, after being displaced from Srebrenica and surrounding Bosniak villages. Source: Getty / Patrick Robert - Corbis/Sygma via Getty Images Remains found decades later Like many of the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of Srebrenica, it wasn't until decades after the "catastrophe" that Avdić found out what happened to the men in her family. In 2012, she received confirmation that her husband's remains had been found. "It was terrible. We were heartbroken," she says. "My father-in-law told me I had to come to bury him. That was the hardest part." Two years earlier, she had also buried her twin brother. Every year, more and more bodies are found. Even after 30 years, many haven't been identified. It was also difficult for children left fatherless by the genocide to bury fathers they hardly remembered. Avdić says her son broke down seeing his father's coffin, though he was only six when he last saw him. "When he lowered it, he screamed. He pulled his own hair out. In that moment, he nearly went mad," she says. "He wanted to gather four stones to bring them back to Australia for his sisters, his brother, and himself to have something to remember that day by. To never forget it. It was very hard for them." Victims of the Srebrenica genocide are buried at the Memorial Center in Potocari, Bosnia. Source: AAP / Darko Bandic/AP War and the collapse of Yugoslavia The armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina broke out three years before the genocide, in 1992, amid the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina were one of six social republics that made up the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia declared independence from the bloc. Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence the following year, not wanting to remain in a country that would thereafter be run by Serbia, the largest of the republics, and its nationalist leader Slobodan Milošević. For centuries, Serbs, Croats and Muslims across the socialist bloc lived together but when Yugoslavia collapsed, fighting broke out between the ethnic groups. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbian-aligned armed forces launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the majority Muslim population, with the aim of establishing the Bosnian Serb Republic. What became known as the Yugoslav Wars resulted in an estimated 140,000 deaths, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice. An estimated 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian War alone — most were Bosnian Muslims. The Bosnian capital Sarajevo was under siege for nearly four years, while Bosniak villages in the east, near the border with Serbia, came under attack and mass killings of Muslims were reported from 1993. Thousands were sent to concentration camps, where there were reports of killing, torture and starvation. Malnourished Croatian and Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war in Manjaca, the largest Serbian concentration camp, 1992. Source: Getty / Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Avdić says she had been living "a good life" in the town of Osat, about 20km east of Srebrenica, until war came to her doorstep. She was pregnant with her fourth child at the time. "There were barricades, we couldn't get to town," she says. "I went into labour alone at home. I gave birth by myself. It was very hard." The years of conflict leading up to the genocide were traumatic for Avdić. "I remember the grenades the most, the fear. Then my husband went to the front line, because he had to protect Srebrenica, to defend the town. I was always afraid that someone would come to the door to take the children. "In 1993, when I was at home, a grenade fell close to me, maybe five metres away. I was holding my child in my arms. And then I lost my hearing. The grenade damaged my left ear." Avdić was among the tens of thousands of people who left their homes for Srebrenica believing it to be safer. But the enclave was frequently shelled. According to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serb forces controlled the access roads and impeded the supply of international humanitarian aid, such as food and medicine, into the town. The UN declared Srebrenica a safe zone in April 1993 and days later called for a total ceasefire in the town, deploying United Nations Protection Forces. Troops rotated and Dutch peacekeepers were on duty when the Srebrenica genocide began to unfold. They were not permitted to use force except in self defence and were later found to have been partly responsible for some of the deaths in Srebrenica. 'No peace without justice': The war crimes tribunal Atrocities were reported from the start of the collapse of the Yugoslav Republic in 1991, and in response, the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993. The tribunal's task was to prosecute those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law. Australian lawyer Graham Blewitt AM, who had in the early 1990s prosecuted Australians believed to have participated in Nazi war crimes, went to the Hague in 1994 to become the deputy prosecutor for the ICTY, a post he held for a decade. "There were reports coming in daily of massacres and atrocities being committed throughout the Balkans," Blewitt tells SBS News. When he arrived, the ICTY had barely started its work and he was responsible for setting up the tribunal. "It was left to me to start recruiting and to set up the office," he says. "I relied on my experience both doing the Nazi war crimes work and my work at the National Crime Authority to design the prosecutor's office." Graham Blewitt (front right), with the judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1994. Credit: Supplied Once set up, Blewitt says they started investigating and prosecuting war crimes. "It was a lot of pressure … the tribunal could not fail because if it did, it would set back the initiatives that were taking place then to establish a permanent international criminal court. "By November [1994], we had already issued our first indictment, which kept the judges very happy." Blewitt says while his team were "up to [their] necks" investigating many other atrocities that had already occurred, he distinctly remembers hearing reports that "something terrible" had occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995. "Within a few days, the reports started to gather momentum and it became very clear that there was something very serious happening in Srebrenica," he says. At that stage, we had no idea that it was going to turn into a genocide. But we realised it was serious enough that we needed to get a team on it straight away. Blewitt says he pulled people from other teams and formed a special investigation unit, which began gathering evidence. With assistance from the US, the team sourced aerial imagery of mass grave sites, determining the location of victims who had been executed. "Once the Serbs found out that we were aware of the grave sites … they started to remove the bodies from those graves, took them to more remote locations and buried the bodies in secondary graves," Blewitt says. "We were able to identify both the primary grave sites and the secondary sites, and we decided to carry out exhumations of the bodies in those grave sites." LISTEN TO SBS English 05/08/2024 07:19 English The ICTY's investigations quickly established that Mladić and the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić were primarily responsible for the killings and took steps to indict them. "Towards the end of 1995 after Srebrenica happened, it was quite clear there was a genocide, and the international community set up peace talks in Dayton [Ohio]," Blewitt says. But there was concern a peace treaty might see Karadžić and Mladić evade accountability, so the ICTY issued their indictments in November. "Our view was that you can't have peace without justice and they were the primary persons responsible for the genocide, so they had to be prosecuted." Defining genocide Both Karadžić and Mladić were found guilty of war crimes and genocide in 2016 and 2017 respectively and handed life sentences. They remain in prison in the Hague. In 1999, then Serbian president Slobodan Milošević was charged with a total of 66 counts of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes across Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, becoming the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal. Milošević was found dead in his cell in the Hague while on trial in 2006. Graham Blewitt holding the indictment for the Slobodan Milošević, then the Serbian President, in 1999. Credit: Supplied The ICTY determined the mass killings of Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica constituted the crime of genocide. "Just looking at the definition of genocide, that there has to be the intent to destroy in whole or in part a political, ethnic, or religious group," Blewitt says. "Looking at Srebrenica, what the Bosnian Serbs were trying to do and in fact did do, was to kill all the men and boys from Srebrenica, and there were thousands of them. In our view that met the criteria for the definition of genocide and that then led to the charge genocide being brought. The tribunal ultimately indicted a total of 161 individuals. "[All of them were] either arrested, stood trial, some were convicted, some were acquitted, some died. But at the end and certainly in my point of view it was a complete and utter success," Blewitt says. "Something I'm very proud of being able to have been involved in." Remembering the victims Commemorations are being held around the world this week, including in Potočari, Bosnia, and by Australia's Bosniak community. Kissing the photos of her husband and brother, Avdić says it's important to tell their stories, so future generations know what happened in Srebrenica. "It's for my children, and my grandchildren," she says. "Because my heart, it can never be young again. It destroyed my best years, my youth. I was only 29 years old." This story was produced in collaboration with SBS Bosnian.

Bosnia commemorates Srebrenica genocide 30 years on
Bosnia commemorates Srebrenica genocide 30 years on

News.com.au

time11-07-2025

  • News.com.au

Bosnia commemorates Srebrenica genocide 30 years on

Thousands of mourners on Friday commemorated in Srebrenica the genocide committed 30 years ago by Bosnian Serb forces, one of Europe's worst atrocities since World War II. The remains of seven victims were laid to rest during the commemorations, which mark the bloodiest episode of Bosnia's inter-ethnic war in the 1990s. They included those of Sejdalija Alic, one of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they captured the eastern town on July 11, 1995. His grand-daughter Anela Alic, whose father was also killed in the massacre and was buried earlier, came to attend the funeral. "I never saw my father ... and today, my grandfather is being buried, just some of his bones, next to his son. "It's a deep sadness... I have no words to describe it," the 32-year-old added, in tears. She was born in early 1994 after her pregnant mother was evacuated in a Red Cross convoy from the ill-fated town. The victims of Srebrenica, which was at the time a UN-protected enclave, were buried in mass graves. So far about 7,000 victims have been identified and buried while about 1,000 are still missing. In a bid to cover up the crime, the Bosnian Serb forces had the remains removed to secondary mass graves, causing many of the bodies to be shredded by heavy machinery, according to experts. - 'Tombstone to caress' - "For 30 years we have carried the pain in our souls," said Munira Subasic, president of the association Mothers of Srebrenica. She lost her husband Hilmo and 17-year-old son Nermin in the massacre. "Our children were killed, innocent, in the UN-protected zone. Europe and the world watched in silence as our children were killed." The seven victims buried under white tombstones on Friday at the memorial centre after a joint prayer included a 19-year-old man and a 67-year-old woman. The remains of most of the victims are incomplete and in some cases consist only of one or two bones, experts said. Families have waited for years to bury their loved ones, hoping that more remains would be found. But Mevlida Omerovic decided not to wait any longer to bury her husband Hasib. He was killed at the age of 33, at one of five mass-execution sites of the massacre, the only atrocity of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war qualified as genocide by international justice institutions. "Thirty years have passed and I have nothing to wait for anymore," said Omerovic, 55. She wants to be able to visit the grave of her husband, even though only his jawbone will be in the coffin. By visiting the graves the victims' relative try to find some comfort. "I have only this tombstone to caress, to pray next to it," said Sefika Mustafic standing next to the graves of her sons Enis and Salim, who were both teenagers when killed. "I'd like to dream about them but it doesn't work. I've said thousands of times 'Come my children, Come into my dream' ... I say it when I pray, when I come here, but it doesn't work." - Serb denial - Canadian veteran Daniel Chenard, deployed with UN peacekeepers here from October 1993 until March 1994 when the Dutch troops took over, attended commemorations haunted by the feeling of guilt for decades. "I forgave myself... I found peace. I always wanted to tell them (victims' families): 'I apologise... I'm sorry for abandoning you'. "We (UN troops) did what we could ... but the tragedy still happened," the 58-year-old said, in tears. Bosnian Serb wartime political and military leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were sentenced to life imprisonment by an international tribunal, notably for the Srebrenica genocide. But Serbia and Bosnian Serb leaders continue to deny that the massacre was a genocide. Last year, an international day of remembrance was established by the United Nations to mark the Srebrenica genocide, despite protests from Belgrade and Bosnian Serbs. On Friday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic voiced condolences to the Srebrenica victims families on behalf of citizens of Serbia calling the massacre a "terrible crime". "We cannot change the past, but we must change the future," he posted on X.

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