Peace Activists Walk 520km to Srebrenica for Genocide Commemoration

The group of 12 mostly Croatian citizens arrived on Tuesday in Olovo, a small town some 50 kilometres north-east of Sarajevo, on their 520-kilometre walk from Dubrovnik to Srebrenica's Potocari memorial centre to mark the anniversary of the 1995 massacres.

"We want to pay respects to those who were killed but also to send a message that we cannot allow something like this to happen ever again," one of them, Nihad Alic, told BIRN.

Alic, a peace activist with a group called Steps of Peace from the northern Bosnian town of Odzak, said the idea was inspired by the annual march in memory of the Srebrenica victims in Dubrovnik.

"The deputy mayor of Dubrovnik supported this idea, as well as the Islamic community in Dubrovnik and local communities along our way," he said.

He explained saying that group will visit various places along their route where there were mass killings during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.

Another group, from Zenica in central Bosnia, also started a peace walk to Srebrenica on Tuesday.

According to media reports, the group of ten walkers are mostly former soldiers from the Bosniak-led Bosnian Army.

Both groups will eventually join those taking part in the annual three-day, 110-kilometre-long Mars Mira (Peace March) to Srebrenica's Potocari memorial centre, which starts on July 8.

Peace March participants trace the reverse path of an estimated 15,000 Bosniak men and boys who fled Srebrenica when it fell to the Bosnian Serb Army in July 1995.

Over 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in a series of massacres after Bosnian Serb forces overran Srebrenica, according to court verdicts.

The Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons says that around 1,000 victims have never been located.

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