Srebrenica

Hundreds of people came to pay their respects as a convoy carrying the remains of 19 victims arrived in Sarajevo before their burial at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre on the 26th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide on June 11.

BIRN's newly-updated database of wartime mass graves shows that few of the 94 sites where Srebrenica victims were buried have been marked, while others have become overgrown or been used as dumps, ploughed for farming or sold as construction sites.

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.

Kosovo MPs adopted a resolution on Wednesday officially recognising the 1995 Srebrenica massacre as genocide, only days before the 26th commemoration of the slaughter of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces.

89 deputies voted for the adoption of the resolution, no one was against or abstained, reports the Pristina Reporters.
At the moment when the President of the Assembly, Glauk Konjufca, announced a point on the Draft Resolution on the committed genocide in Srebrenica, the deputies of the Serbian List and Minister Goran Raki left the session.

The Cair municipality in Skopje has announced ahead of the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide on July 11 that it will soon install a memorial commemorating the victims of worst atrocity in post-World War II Europe.

Nikolic had a conversation with representatives of the Serb-run Bratunac municipality and the local police, and it was agreed to contact state-owned companies and ask them to provide the heavy machinery required.

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.

A change in the law between 2003 and 2007 allowed him to do so by declaring that relatives of Srebrenica victims could be buried alongside them at Potocari. Then the law changed back, limiting the cemetery to only those killed in July 1995.

Such details, however, were lost on Twitter users who in June wrote: "Emir Suljagic, exhume your father from the cemetery in Potocari!"