Turkish PM Erdoğan shares grief of Srebrenica victims

Turkey’s prime minister addressed tens of thousands of weeping mourners Sunday in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica as they buried almost 800 victims of the worst crime in Europe since the Nazi era.

“Those who were killed there are still with us,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said at the ceremony marking the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre before the burial of 775 recently identified victims, the youngest of which were two boys aged 14. Some 3,749 bodies are already in the Potocari graveyard.

That total is less than a tenth of the number of Muslim men and boys executed after Serb forces overran the U.N.-protected town on July 11, 1995, during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

The massacre in Srebrenica blackened not only the history of the Balkans, but also all of Europe, Erdoğan said, adding that the dignity of humanity was deeply wounded in the Bosnian town 15 years ago.

“There is no doubt that those who died in Srebrenica were martyrs. In our eyes, they are not dead, but alive. Even now, they are with us, listening to us, watching us,” Erdoğan, who attended the ceremony along with other Balkan leaders, told the crowd in Turkish.

Fifteen years ago, 30,000 Bosnian Muslims flocked to the U.N. military base in the town’s suburb of Potocari for refuge. But when Serb forces came, outnumbered Dutch troops opened the gates. The Serbs separated the men and boys from the rest of the crowd, putting them on trucks and carting them away, the vast majority never to be seen again.

The Srebrenica memorial center now stands across the road from that former U.N. base. The bodies being buried Sunday were previously excavated from mass graves and identified through DNA tests.

“We will remember the victims of the Srebrenica genocide and emphasize that such a tragedy should never happen again,” Erdoğan said prior to his departure from Ankara’s Esenboğa International Airport on Saturday.


/Hurriyet Daily News/