Srebrenica massacre remembered 10 years on

Families grieved over the skeletal remains of the Srebrenica victims on Monday at the 10th anniversary of the massacre, as the West acknowledged its failure to prevent Europe's worst atrocity in 50 years.

Women in white headscarves wept and touched some of the 610 green-draped coffins lined up under a grey sky at the Potocari cemetery.

The bodies of those murdered by Bosnian Serb troops had lain for years in hidden pits after the systematic slaughter of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys taken from what was supposed to be a UN-protected "safe area."

Identification was only made possible by DNA analysis, and their bones came home for burial in narrow boxes tagged with a number and a name.

"Srebrenica was the failure of NATO, of the West, of peacekeeping and of the United Nations. It was the tragedy that should never be allowed to happen again," said former U.S. Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke.

A message from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan repeated that Srebrenica would haunt the world body forever. The 400 Dutch troops who were guarding Srebrenica's Muslims were swept aside by Bosnian Serb forces while the UN rejected appeals for air strikes by NATO to halt their advance.

"The victims had put their trust in international protection. But we, the international community, let them down," said a message from European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana. "This was a colossal, collective and shameful failure."

"The truth cannot be forgotten, it cannot be denied. The evil must be spoken about for the evil not to be forgotten," said Mustafa Efendi Ceric, Bosnia's chief Islamic cleric.

But ten years on and even with the evidence of the massacre hardline Serbs continue to insist that any killing was simply a hard fact of war or a justifiable act of revenge. Some continue to deny the massacre occurred.

Serbia's President Boris Tadic attended the memorial, though some Bosnian Muslims said they do not welcome him while Serb nationalists objected, saying he should come to their rival memorials for Serb war dead this week.

A choir sang the mournful "Srebrenica Inferno" as families walked the rows of freshly dug graves looking for the final resting place of their fathers, husbands and sons. Tens of thousands turned to Mecca and knelt for prayers.

"Our pain continues, every year we come to bury someone else," said Hajrija Mujic, who was burying her father-in-law. Her husband's remains were identified too late for burial today.

The massacre, in the final months of a 43-month war that claimed 200,000 lives, aimed to ensure there were no Muslims to fight back or reclaim Serb-occupied land or homes in the future.

Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic and his political master Radovan Karadzic have been indicted for genocide for the atrocity by the UN War Crimes tribunal. But to the anger of Bosnians and the embarrassment of Western powers that intervened belatedly, both remain at large.

The court's chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, said she wasn't attending today's ceremony to protest the failure of Serb authorities to hand over the two men.

"She's not attending because how can she face the families of the victims, the people to whom she's not been able to bring justice?'' said Florence Hartmann, a spokeswoman for del Ponte, in a telephone interview. "We collected the evidence and made the indictment, but we can't do anything if the Serb authorities won't even arrest these people.''

"The failure to arrest them is a great failure which we all regret. They must be caught," said Holbrooke.

Monday's funerals will raise the number of identified and buried Srebrenica victims to about 2,000. There are 7,000 more body bags with partial remains still awaiting identification and 20 more mass graves awaiting excavation.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is mandated to complete its trials by 2008 and review all appeals by 2010. There are 20 fugitives who should face trial in The Hague, more than dozen of them living freely in Serbia, del Ponte said in a report to the UN Security Council in November.