Squatting next to her father, she gently patted the green. “This is my father, this is my father,” was all she could say, rocking on the souls of her feet. Four other members of her family were being buried near by.

Her father, Adem Mehmedovic, was 66 when she last saw him in July 1995 at the fall of Srebrenica. Over the next few days 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically slaughtered by Bosnian Serb forces.

She did not know whether her father was alive or dead until she wandered into this cemetery and found his grave among the rows and rows of other victims. The authorities had somehow failed to tell her that he had been found and that he was to be buried.

She still does not know what happened to her husband or her three brothers-in-law.

Yet the families here are the lucky ones. They have come to bury 600 victims who have been identified, plucked from the pits, holes and rubbish tips where their remains were dumped. Mass graves dot this pretty countryside.

From first light the coaches came chugging into Potocari, a small village in the valley a mile from Srebrenica. More than a hundred coaches were carrying the grieving widows and sisters and mothers.

The coffins were laid out in the new cemetery, built for the victims of Europe’s worse massacre since the Second World War. Ten thousand white tombstones will be erected eventually, but at the moment it is a sea of dried mud, the size of three football pitches.

“We send a message to all those whose knives and bullets issued this justice,” Almedina Dautbasic said on behalf of the families. “You did kill our children, our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, our husbands. You tried to kill one whole people. But remember, you did not kill our memory.”

Her words were carried by loudspeaker to about 10,000 people who had made the trip to the cemetery. Bosnian Serb police, brought in to provide security for the day, looked on nonchalantly from the road and from the encircling hills. This is still a hardline Serb area where few Muslims have returned. Many of the killers are thought to still live locally.

Abdulah Purkovic, 55, is one of the few Muslims who has moved back to Srebrenica. He escaped the slaughter in 1995 because he was working as an assistant for the aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières. He taught cooking at the local school before the war. Now he has opened a restaurant.

“I had to come back. This is my town. I believed in myself. My wife and my children tried to obstruct me, but I am stubborn and persistent like a real Bosnian. But I don’t like to think what went before.”

Later I walked into the former UN compound across the road where the detritus of war remains. There is graffiti on the walls, written by the Dutch soldiers stationed there, some of it vulgar. And there is graffiti from the people who have gone.

On one wall, in an alcove in the main building, is written: “Greetings to Rizo and Sahid and everyone. I am forgotten.”

• Two Bosnian Croats were sentenced to up to 20 years in prison yesterday by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague for persecuting Bosnia Muslims in 1993. Mladen Naletilic, 56, and Vinko Martinovic, 36, had denied committing crimes against huimanity during the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims from Mostar. Naletilic was the founder of the Kaznjenicka Bojna military unit and Martinovic, who was jailed for 18 years, was one of his commanders. They were seized during a police swoop on organised crime in Split in 1997. (AFP)

  8,000 murdered

  In April 1993 the United Nations declared Srebrenica a “safe haven” for refugees and promised to protect it. In July 1995 the Bosnian Serb army, under Ratko Mladic, entered the town, meeting little resistance from the Dutch peacekeepers. The town’s 40,000 residents left, with an estimated 15,000 fleeing to the hills, the rest seeking refuge at the UN base. The Dutch agreed to hand over those at the base for relocation and provided the Bosnian Serbs with a list of the names of the men. They were separated from the women and killed. Those in the hills were surrounded and killed. As many as 8,000 people died.

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