Bosnian Muslims Mark Anniversary of 1995 Srebrenica Massacre

Weeping widows who lost their husbands and sons in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II lashed out Wednesday at Slobodan Milosevic on the sixth anniversary of the slaughter.

“Milosevic is the biggest butcher in the world, and he is responsible for what happened to us,” said Zineta Mujic, who was among thousands of tearful Muslims who gathered to pay tribute to the estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys who were systematically killed by Serbian forces in July 1995.

“His string puppets, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, are also responsible and must pay for what they did here,” said Mujic, who lost her son and 13 other relatives when the Serbs overran the United Nations “safe haven” during the nation’s war.

Former Yugoslav President Milosevic is awaiting trial before the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. The tribunal has said it expects to also indict him for atrocities committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia during the 1991-95 wars in the former Yugoslav federation.

Karadzic, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and his military chief, Mladic, top the tribunal’s most-wanted list. They have been indicted on charges of genocide stemming from atrocities their forces committed during the war, including the Srebrenica massacre.

Mustafa Ceric, the head of Bosnia’s Islamic community, who led Wednesday’s ceremony, said survivors wanted to make “clear that we will not give up justice.”

“We pray for sorrow to become hope, for revenge to become justice, and for a mother’s tears to become a reminder so that Srebrenica will never happen again to anyone, anywhere,” he said.

Bosnian Serb war crime suspects still enjoy strong popular support. Serbian nationalists recently organized several attacks on Muslims at groundbreaking ceremonies for the reconstruction of mosques destroyed during Bosnia’s war, killing one Muslim and injuring dozens of others.

As many as 2,000 local policemen, accompanied by several hundred U.S. peacekeepers and international police officers, provided tight security for the estimated 5,000 Muslims who attended Wednesday’s ceremony about 45 miles northeast of Sarajevo, the capital. No incidents were reported.

Five widows unveiled a memorial stone in a cornfield that will be turned into a cemetery for the reburial of massacre victims.