(11 Jul 2023)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Potocari - 11 July 2023
1. Choir performing Srebrenica Requiem composition inside memorial cemetery
2. Various of officials, victims’ relatives placing flowers at monument to massacre victims
3. Groups of mourners with black banners reading (Bosnian) “We remember”
4. Choir performing Srebrenica Requiem
5. Mourners standing beside caskets, performing Islamic funeral prayer
6. Close of casket on ground
7. Various of mourners performing Islamic funeral prayer
8. Close of man’s hands raised in prayer
9. Various of mourners carrying caskets to their graves, moving through crowd of people gathered for funeral
10. Two women hugging, crying
11. Islamic preacher standing inside grave, covering casket with planks of wood
12. Various of men burying caskets
13. SOUNDBITE (Bosnian) Abdulah Esmic, Srebrenica massacre survivor who buried his uncle on Tuesday:
“I cannot describe how I feel. I was here during the war, from the start in 1992 until the signing of the Dayton (peace agreement). I lost my mother, a brother, two cousins, uncles and many other relatives (in the war), it had a devastating impact on me.”
14. Men carrying casket
15. Men filling grave with earth
16. Women standing in the cemetery
17. SOUNDBITE (Bosnian) Mevlija Sabanovic, Srebrenica massacre survivor who buried her cousin on Tuesday:
“We are very sad and we will always be sad. There is nothing more I could say, there is so much sadness in us for all these years, we are struggling to live with (the consequences) of this genocide. But we must keep talking about this genocide because we, the victims, are being humiliated constantly and that it is not right, I think, we must find a way to live together.”
18. Various of mourners praying next to fresh grave
STORYLINE:
Tens of thousands of people from around Bosnia and abroad gathered in Srebrenica on Tuesday for the annual ritual of commemorating the 1995 massacre in the eastern town and to give a dignified burial to the victims unearthed from mass graves and only recently identified through DNA analysis.
Twenty-eight years after they were brutally murdered in Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Holocaust, 27 men and three teenage boys were laid to rest Tuesday at a vast and ever-expanding memorial cemetery just outside Srebrenica, joining more than 6,600 massacre victims already reburied there.
Relatives of the victims can bury only partial remains of their loved ones as they are typically found scattered over several different mass graves, sometimes miles (kilometres) apart.
The Srebrenica killings were the bloody crescendo of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which came after the breakup of Yugoslavia unleashed nationalist passions and territorial ambitions that set Bosnian Serbs against the country’s two other main ethnic populations — Croats and Bosniaks.
On 11 July 1995, Bosnian Serbs overran a U.N.-protected safe haven in Srebrenica.
They separated at least 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys from their wives, mothers and sisters, chased them through woods around the ill-fated town, and slaughtered them.
The perpetrators then plowed their victims’ bodies into hastily made mass graves, which they later dug up with bulldozers, scattering the remains among other burial sites to hide the evidence of their war crimes.
The Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic were both convicted of genocide in Srebrenica by a special U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
AP Video shot by Eldar Emric and Vojislav Stjepanovic
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