Pictures Of The Year 2005 (2)

The Associated Press
July 11, 2005

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Women wept Monday as they finally buried husbands and sons 10 years after Europe’s worst massacre since World War II — funerals made possible by the excavation of mass graves of victims killed by Bosnian Serb forces in an abandoned car battery factory that was the wartime base for Dutch U.N. soldiers.

The Dutch were supposed to protect Srebrenica — a designated U.N. safe zone— from Serb attacks during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. But outmanned and outgunned, the Dutch mission watched as Srebrenica’s men and boys were separated from the women and led away, to be slain and dumped into shallow graves that are still being discovered a decade later.

To the sound of Muslim prayers echoing across a sprawling green valley, family members wandered among 610 caskets of the most recently identified victims of the July 11, 1995, massacre, in which some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.

On a fence, families of the victims hung a huge banner with their own count of the dead. It read: “Europe’s shame — genocide. 8,106 murdered in Srebrenica.”