It's been eighteen years since the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and today on the anniversary of the mass killing, the country reburied another 409 victims, including a newborn baby, of Europe's worst atrocity since the Holocaust as thousands of mourners looked on, the Washington Post reports.
The Srebrenica massacre, a mass murder of people in and around the town by military units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić, was described by Secretary-General of the U.N. as "the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War" in a U.N. press release. According to Reuters, the massacre was a culmination of an ethnic cleansing policy by Mladić, whose aim was to carve a pure Serbian state out of the diverse Bosnian population.
Among the mourners today was Hava Muhic, standing near her husband's grave, above the smallest pit in the cemetery where her newborn baby girl who died during the massacre 18 years ago was about to be laid to rest for the final time. Muhic's baby, whom she never had the chance to name, was among the remains of 409 people recently identified after being found in mass graves in Srebrenica. The victims were reburied at the Potocari Memorial Center today, this year's commemoration bringing the total of identified victims to 6,066. There are currently 2,306 others who remain missing.
A marker above Muhic's baby girl's little green coffin reads: "Newborn Munich (father Hajrudin) 11.07.1995", the date eerily marking both her day of birth and death.
Muhic told the Post that she blames her daughter's death on the frantic rush to safety as Bosnian Serbs overran the town and residents tried to flee to a U.N. military base for shelter. As Muhic passed through the gates of the U.N. base, she felt the pains of oncoming labor. A woman who helped her give birth in the compound told her that her baby was born dead, her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Muhic recalled the moment she learned of her baby's tragic fate to the Post.
"Two men in uniform came," she said. "They took my baby and put it in a box. They asked me for my personal information and I gave it to them. They said they were taking the baby to bury it."
While there is no way of knowing whether or not the chaos had anything to do with the newborn's death, Muhic, then 24-years old, spent 18 years not knowing where her child was buried.
In 1995, Srebrenica was a U.N. protected town of Muslims in Bosnia, beseiged by Serb forces through the 1992-5 war. Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in the summer that year by Bosnian Serb forces over the course of five days, towards the end of a war that had begun in '92 after the collapse of federal Yugoslavia.
"I feel like I'm losing them again today," Ramiza Siljkovic, 62, told the Post while kneeling by two freshly dug graves for the remains of her sons. "Only a handful of their bones were recovered from two mass graves."
"Innocent and helpless victims were faced with the cold and merciless hatred of criminals akin to those in the Nazi camps of Hitler's Germany," Bakir Izetbegovic, son of Bosnia's wartime president and the Muslim member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, told reporters. "We have been asking ourselves through these 18 years - what could they have been guilty of, and to whom, in those hellish days?"
In a recent statement marking the anniversary of the massacre, the European Union called for progress in reconciliation: "Large steps have been made in that direction, but there is still much to be done, especially by those in positions of authority, so that citizens of the region can fully enjoy peace and prosperity, together with their fellow Europeans."
