At least 25 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide will be buried during the July 11 commemoration at the memorial center in Potocari this year.

This number is not final. More human remains that were found are still being identified. Also, some families do not want to bury the few bones of their loved ones that were found and identified until more of the skeleton is found.

“We expect that this number will be higher, as there are remains of another 44 victims who were officially identified in the Podrinje identification centre in Tuzla,” the spokesperson of the Missing Person Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lejla Cengic, said.

“These victims were mainly exhumed earlier from numerous mass graves and secondary mass graves,” she said, adding that among those who are ready to be buried, are the remains of two 16-year-old boys.

After they executed the victims, Bosnian Serb forces dumped the bodies in mass graves around Srebrenica but then several months later, they uncovered the graves and dug the already decomposing bodies out with backhoes. They then reburied them in so-called ‘secondary’ mass graves in other locations in order to hide the crime.

This is why often the bones of one victim are found in several different mass graves.

In many cases, the families of the victims want to wait until all bones are found and the body of the victim can be put to rest completed.

“Apart from this number, remains of another 131 victims who were identified through DNA analysis, but have not been identified by the their families, sit in the Podrinje identification centre,” Cengic said, adding that in the coming period those identifications are also scheduled to take place.

These are mainly incomplete remains, found in secondary mass graves.

“Because of this, families have a hard time deciding to bury their loved ones, as in some cases only one bone was found,” Cengic said.

The reason why there is such a little number of newly identified victims, Cengic explained, is that no larger mass grave has been found since the one in Kozluk, near Zvornik, in 2015. The remains of 55 victims were exhumed there, of which 15 were complete bodies and 40 incomplete.

Until now, 6.575 victims of the massacre have been laid to rest in the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Centre. Another 1.000 are still being searched for.