Newly identified victims are reburied each year on July 11 — the anniversary of the day the killing began in 1995 — in the vast and still expanding memorial cemetery outside Srebrenica.
So far, the remains of more than 6,600 people have been found and buried at the cemetery. The remains of 50 more victims, recently found in mass graves and identified through DNA analysis, will be put to rest there on Monday. On Friday, people lined Sarajevo's main street as a huge truck bearing their coffins passed by on its way to Srebrenica.
The truck stopped in front of Bosnia's presidency where the people paying respect tucked flowers into its canvas. Among them was Fatima Aljic, whose son, husband and brother were killed in the massacre. Aljic is still searching for their remains.
"Every year I come to bid farewell to the victims and it is difficult — it is very hard," Aljic said before tearing up. "It would be hard even to witness what happened to us happening to someone else, let alone to experience it yourself."
The Srebrenica killings were the bloody crescendo of the war in Bosnia, which came after the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalistic passions and territorial ambitions that set Bosnian Serbs against the country's two other main ethnic factions — Croats and Bosniaks.
The massacre has been declared a genocide by international and national courts, but Serb leaders in Bosnia and neighbouring Serbia continue to downplay or even deny it despite the irrefutable evidence of what happened.
