Every summer, a few more victims are laid to rest, thanks to the work of the ICMP and its partners, including Bosnia’s Missing Persons Institute. This year, 14 people were buried in a ceremony at Potocari Cemetery – close to Srebrenica.
That can make an enormous difference to the relatives of those who died.
“It’s hard not to have a place where you can pay tribute to your loved ones,” says Mirela Osmanovic, who works at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre.
Her two teenage brothers, Velid and Ahmedin, both died in the massacre two years before she was born.
“Thankfully, we found their bodies,” she says, “and we buried them at the Memorial Centre in Srebrenica. But finding their bones and accepting what had happened was a really long process.”
Mirela never knew her brothers, though she has heard tales about them from her family. And she was keenly aware of the anguish, mixed with hope, that her parents felt in the decade before their sons’ bodies were found and identified.
She says the moment marked the closure of a painful chapter of their lives, because until then they were hoping someone would knock on the door and say her brothers were alive.
“They were buried in 2006 and 2008. That was actually quite early. Even 30 years after the genocide, there are families who have not found their loved ones,” says Mirela.
Zekija Avdibegovic is from such a family. She chairs the missing persons association in the town of Ilijas, near Sarajevo.
More than 30 years on from their disappearance, she’s still hoping for news of her husband, son and seven other family members.
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Publish date : 2024-09-27 18:31:00
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