A Silent History: Battle to Tell the Truth and Honor Srebrenica's Dead

Three decades after genocide was committed in the middle of Europe, memories in the rest of the world are beginning to fade, helped along by a relentless effort by the perpetrators and their allies to cover up evidence.

- Julian Borger

But the sprawling murder scene in the hills and fields around Srebrenica continues to cough up its bones.

In the town of Bratunac, 6 miles north of Srebrenica town, a group burial was recently performed of victims' remains that had been identified over the course of the preceding year.

Imams gathered from across the country to pray before a line of six coffins draped in the blue and gold Bosnian flag.

A crowd of about 1,000 Bosnian Muslims gathered in the surrounding graveyard, where a digger had been used to carve out six new holes, one of them just a small trench to accommodate the body of a one-year-old, Almera Paraganlija, killed alongside her mother, Zineta, by Bosnian Serb gunmen when they rampaged through the village of Joševa.

Hajrudin Paraganlija, husband to Zineta and father to Almera, stood at the graveside to see them finally buried, more than 30 years after he had last held them in his arms.

"It is a kind of peace to at least know where they are," he said, though his sunken cheeks and unfocused stare did not look like those of a man at peace; rather one hollowed out by grief. His mother's and brother's bodies have yet to be found.

He lingered by the graves before following the rest of the crowd down a narrow road that leads from the Muslim cemetery to Bratunac's main road. Serb police kept the traffic moving but otherwise there was no interaction with the mourners as they boarded buses to leave town. Local Serbs went about their business without making eye contact. It was as if the mourners, having buried their dead, had themselves become invisible as ghosts.