Thousands have turned out to pay their respects on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, as 136 more coffins of identified victims were brought to a memorial centre to be buried the next day.
(abc.net.au) - Bosnian soldiers in battlefield uniforms, survivors of the massacre, but also ordinary people carried the coffins, wrapped in green, several hundred metres from a hangar that served as a UN base 20 years ago to the Srebrenica memorial cemetery.
Women silently cried as the coffins were laid out on a lawn before being buried during the ceremony.
Among the 136 victims, identified last year by DNA tests, were members of families that lost all of their male members in the killing, according to the Bosnian institute for missing persons.
To date, 6,241 victims have been found, identified and buried at the memorial centre.
About 230 others have been laid to rest in other cemeteries at their families' request.
The massacre has been qualified as genocide by two international courts.
The remains of victims that will be buried on July 11 have been found in several mass graves or in forests where men were killed in ambushes.
In most cases only parts of the remains were found as their bones were moved from mass graves to so-called "secondary" graves in an effort to hide the true extent of the massacre.
Some 50,000 people are expected to attend the ceremony on Saturday, including top international officials, among them former US president Bill Clinton.
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has also said he will participate in the commemoration.
Days after it vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have condemned the massacre as a genocide, Russia called for all people responsible to be brought to justice.
"We strongly advocate that all persons who participated in these and other crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina should face justice and be punished as soon as possible," Russia's foreign ministry said in statement.
On Wednesday, Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, said the British-drafted resolution to call the massacre "a crime of genocide" unfairly singled out Bosnian Serbs for war crimes.
Russia exercised its veto when the resolution was put to vote.
China, Nigeria, Venezuela and Angola abstained. Full Story
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