POTOCARI, Bosnia (Islamweb & Agencies) - More than 3,000 Bosnian Muslims guarded by U.S. peacekeepers prayed in a meadow near Srebrenica on Wednesday for thousands of compatriots killed by Serb forces in Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.U.S. troops as well as local Serb police were out in force along the road to Srebrenica and near the old battery factory in the suburb of Potocari where a lightly armed Dutch U.N. force had watched helplessly in July 1995 as Muslim men and boys were separated from families and led away by Bosnian Serbs.
Eight thousand Muslims were reported missing and are presumed to have been killed by Serbs, either in cold blood or as they tried to flee Srebrenica after nationalist Serb forces overran it despite its wartime status as a U.N. ``safe area.''
As the mourners set off, NATO peacekeepers were deployed to deter possible assaults by Serbs angry at being blamed for the Srebrenica bloodletting, but no incidents were reported.
NEVER AGAIN
Mustafa efendi Ceric, the head of Bosnia's Islamic Community, said in a speech that his people had gathered to pray so that the atrocities of Srebrenica never happened again.
Ceric said Serbs risked collective guilt for crimes committed in Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war as long as they could not come to terms with what was done in their name and indicted war criminals remained free.
``There should not be collective guilt but you should also not hide criminals behind the people,'' he said.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander General Ratko Mladic, indicted by the U.N. war crimes court for the Srebrenica massacre, are believed to be hiding in the mountainous wilds of Serb-run eastern Bosnia
Asked about the whereabouts of Karadzic, Mladic and other perpetrators of the Srebrenica crime, Amor Masovic, head of the Bosnian Muslim State Commission for Missing Persons, replied:``Some of them are already in the U.N. jail. Some of them are still free and are maybe watching us from somewhere nearby.'' Masovic's commission has exhumed about 6,000 victims of ``ethnic cleansing'' throughout Bosnia. (Read photo caption)
Wednesday's mourners were the largest number of Muslims to visit the Srebrenica area since the war.
Srebrenica, an overwhelmingly Muslim town before July 1995, is now populated almost totally by Serbs, many of them refugees from areas now in Bosnia's post-war Muslim Croat federation.
More than 30 ambassadors and senior officials from the European Union also attended the commemoration.
RECENT VIOLENCE HEIGHTENS CONCERN
Muslim worshippers and Western officials were attacked by a mob during Serb nationalist riots in May at a ceremony to rebuild a mosque, heightening concern over the Srebrenica event.
Husein Djekic, who said he spent 38 days in the hilly woods near Srebrenica before escaping to Bosnian Muslim-held territory during the war, said he would not return to his Bratunac home, which had in any case been burned.
The remains of some 4,500 Srebrenica victims stored in the nearby town of Tuzla, in Bosnia's Muslim-Croat half, will be buried in the meadow near the town after DNA tests to try to identify them. Two hundred more were unearthed just this month.
Husic remembered Mladic coming to talk to fearful inhabitants of Srebrenica as his troops flooded through the enclave. ``He made out as if everything would be okay,'' she said.
PHOTO CAPTION:
A forensic expert of the Tuzla-based hospital cleans bones July 10, 2001, believed to belong to Bosnian Muslims from the wartime U.N. protected enclave of Srebrenica and found in a mass grave site in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia earlier this month. Bosnians will mark the sixth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre July 11 when Bosnian Serb forces entered the U.N. protected enclave committing what is seen as the worst Europe's war crime since the World War II.. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj