Memorial Centre

Cries of anguish from victims' relatives could also be heard as thousands braved the 36-degree heat to attend the 28th anniversary commemoration and open-air collective prayer.

Bosniaks carry caskets with victims' remains during the funeral ceremony. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR.

"First they wanted the graveyard to be located on the mountains above Srebrenica, it's called Otave Plato," Malic told BIRN at the Centre for Elderly Mothers of Srebrenica in the village of Potocari, the care home where she lives now, less than a kilometre away from the Memorial Centre.

The 'Mother's Scarf' art installation, part of the Srebrenica Heroines initiative, will open next month at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre as part of commemorations to mark the 27th anniversary of the 1995 genocide of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces.

The new memorial room, entitled 'The Lives Behind the Fields of Death', opened on Tuesday at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, with the intention of highlighting survivors' stories and combatting genocide denial.

Several times a week, the Memorial Centre at Donja Gradina - the place where prisoners in the Ustasa-run Jasenovac-Stara Gradiska concentration camp complex in Croatia were brought every day to be liquidated - publishes posts on Twitter commemorating the lives of the camp's victims.

Velic had fled to Srebrenica with her husband and children after her home village of Pobudje, near Bratunac, had come under fire.

But when Bosnian Serb forces seized Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, she and her family had to flee again.

"I thought: 'People will not survive, they will kill us.' And so they did," she recalled.

BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Srebrenica Memorial Centre presented the video project 'The Lives Behind the Fields of Death' on Wednesday at a conference in Srebrenica that highlighted the role of oral history in combatting genocide denial and revisionism.

The Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina told BIRN that 19 people's remains will be laid to rest in a ceremony at the cemetery at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre on July 11.

Missing Persons Institute spokesperson Emza Fazlic said that the youngest victim to be buried this year will be Azmir Osmanovic, who was killed at the age of 16.

To understand how important this was, one has to know that the Srebrenica Memorial Centre operates in a very hostile environment in Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska, where denial of the Srebrenica genocide is widespread, alleged war criminals live freely, and there is little state support for truth-seeking and research of wartime crimes.