Srebrenica survivors return 10 years after mass killings

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina – One thousand Muslims who made a perilous escape from Srebrenica trekked toward their bloodied hometown Friday, a decade after thousands of their countrymen died in the Bosnian war’s worst massacre.

Nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed toward the end of the 1992-95 war when Bosnian Serbs troops overran the eastern Bosnian enclave. Serbs rounded up the town’s male residents, shot all who couldn’t flee and scattered their remains in mass graves that continue to be found a decade later.

The Bosnian Muslims – mindful of mine fields still in the area – walked carefully as they began their symbolic walk back to the site of Europe’s worst slaughter since World War II.

“We will try to avoid paths through woods that could still be mined. The last thing we want to see is that someone gets hurt on this route again,” said Ramo Dautbasic, 37, a survivor of the July 1995 massacre and the organizer of the memorial march.

Dautbasic was among the 15,000 Muslims who tried to walk to freedom to the Muslim-controlled part of the country when Serb troops on July 11, 1995, stormed past 150 outnumbered and outgunned Dutch peacekeepers charged with protecting the U.N.-declared safe zone.

Dautbasic, his father and two brothers split up on the first day of the march, and he never again saw his 57-year-old father, Esed, or his brothers Aziz, 31, and Sefket, 29.

The marchers will arrive in Srebrenica on Sunday evening and join about 50,000 people, including regional leaders and U.S. and other international dignitaries, to mark the grim anniversary.