Many of the remains buried at the Srebrenica–Potocari Memorial are incomplete and the head of an association of mothers of those killed in the 1995 genocide called upon anyone who knows where the rest of the bones are buried to come forward.
“The genocide began in 1995 and I think it is still ongoing today, as the mothers who survived it don’t have it easy,” said Munira Subasic, the head of the ‘Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves’.
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“We gave birth to children with heads, hands, feet (…) Unfortunately, there are no heads, nor hands, nor legs in every casket,” she said.
After they executed nearly 8,000 Srebrenica men and boys in 1995, the Bosnian Serb forces buried the victims in mass graves. A few months later, they dug up the bodies and reburied them at other locations in an effort to cover up the crime.
This was mostly done with bulldozers and the machines tore up the bodies while loading them on trucks to be transported to some other location. By the time the remains were reburied into another grave, the bodies were a simple mix of people’s bones.
Those who committed the atrocities are being “left isolated,” Subasic argued.
“The belt is becoming tighter. I think that their conscience will start working, that they will accept the truth. They need to do that as soon as possible, not because of us, mothers, but because of the youth left behind us,” she said, explaining that it is important for children, regardless of their ethnicity, to have a better and happier future “than the one we and our children had.”
She reminded that she buried two of her son’s bones in 2013.
“For all this lack of mass graves, them not being opened, the State Court is to blame, as the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina can do a lot more. If it is releasing war criminals, then it can at least ask them where the mass graves are. If we don’t have enough bones, if we don’t have enough specimens, then we cannot have enough bodies for burial,” she said.
She called on all those who have knowledge about the whereabouts of mass graves to provide that information, regardless of who may be in those graves.
