A total of 35 graves have been dug in the Srebrenica Memorial Centre – Potocari for the collective burial of 35 identified genocide victims on July 11.
Nermin Alivukovic, Head of the Organizing Board for marking of the 23rd anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide told Anadolu Agency that everything is ready for the marking of the anniversary of the genocide against Bosniaks at the UN’s Safe Zone which took place on July 11, 1995.
According to him, the Board expects between 20,000 and 30,000 guests at the ceremony who will pay their respects to the victims.
He recalled that over 6,000 people had set off Sunday on the Nezuk-Potocari ‘Peace March’.
“For the first time this year, participants of the march will have the opportunity to walk the 17 kilometre-long trail, identical to the one used by Srebrenica residents in July 1995, running away from from the Republika Srpska Army and Police in the direction of Nezuk, Tuzla’s free territory,” Alivukovic said.
The ‘Peace March’ is an annual peace walk in Bosnia and Herzegovina, held in memory of the victims of mass murders in Srebrenica in 1995. The march gathers thousands of participants from the country and the rest of the world, and it takes the opposite direction of that the survivors took in the 1990s.
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The first march was held in 2005, marking the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres that, as the international court ruled, constituted a genocide. In April 1993 the UN had declared the besieged enclave of the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica a safe area under the UN protection. However, in July 1995 the Dutch battalion soldiers failed to prevent the town’s capture by the Bosnian Serb forces and the massacre that followed.
More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in the genocide committed in the days after 11 July 1995 and so far the remains of more than 6,600 have been found and buried.
