Srebrenica: an open wound
Some bodies lay in plain sight on the floor of the forest when Dr Vedo Tuco, a forensic pathologist, entered Srebrenica at the end of the Bosnian war. Others he's still digging for - 20 years later.
"It was so quiet, there wasn't even the sound of the birds," Tuco, 48, said last month as a digger probed for bones in the yard of an empty house. "Once I started, I never stopped."
On July 11, Bosnia marks the 20th anniversary of Europe’s worst mass killing since World War Two - the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces during five July days in 1995.
Before: Forensic experts examine bodies in a mass grave.
After: The site today includes plants and wooden buildings.
Story
Even now, the forests and farmland around Srebrenica are yielding bones: over 1,000 victims are missing, tossed into pits then dug up months later and scattered in smaller graves by Bosnian Serb forces trying to conceal the crime.
Investigators believe at least one more big grave eludes them, while the accused architects – Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Ratko Mladic – are still standing trial at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, fiercely unrepentant.
As such, Srebrenica remains an open wound, the lack of closure a dark shadow over Bosnia, where many Serbs still dispute what went on.
"I found and buried my husband, but have yet to reach my son."
Hajra Catic’s son Nino was 26 years old when Dutch U.N. peacekeepers abandoned the 'safe haven' of Srebrenica to Mladic on July 11, 1995.
"If I don't find him, if I don't have his grave ... they deny, they deny so many were killed, they can say tomorrow that I never even had him."
Before: Forensic experts work at the site of a mass grave.
After: Crops grow at the same location today.
Story
For Muslim Bosniaks, Srebrenica has become a symbol of collective suffering. Serbs see it as a stick for the world to beat them with; many dispute the death toll and deny it was genocide, as the U.N. tribunal has ruled.
Milorad Dodik, president of Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic, last month called the massacre "the greatest deception of the 20th century".
He and Serbia have enlisted big-power ally Russia to block a British-drafted U.N. Security Council resolution condemning any denial of Srebrenica as genocide.
Insisting the resolution would not pass, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic announced on Tuesday that he would attend the anniversary commemoration.
Before: Forensic workers unearth bodily remains from a mass grave.
After: Grass and trees grow on the site today.
Story
"An entire generation has come of age with the denial of accountability often presented as the only 'truth,' and that is disconcerting," said Dijana Jelaca of St. John's University in New York.
Jelaca said Srebrenica had become a tool by which political leaders on all sides whip up tensions, score political points and divert attention from the political and economic stagnation that has characterised the last decade in Bosnia.
Even so, a landmark court case is scheduled in Serbia this year.
Tuco, who works for the Bosnia-based International Committee for Missing Persons, is due to give testimony at the trial of seven Serbs, who in March were among the first alleged Srebrenica gunmen to be arrested in the country.
Before: Forensic experts search for human remains.
After: A renovated house looks over the same location.
Bullet holes riddle the walls of an abandoned cultural centre. Around 700 Muslim from Srebrenica were killed at the site.
A stage is seen inside an abandoned cultural centre.
A poster of Russian President Vladimir Putin with the caption Republika Srpska hangs in the main residence of an abandoned agricultural cooperative where between 1,000 and 1,500 people were killed.
Plants grow outside the main residence of the agricultural cooperative.
A hole in a wall is seen at an abandoned battery factory where approximately 6,000 people were held captive. The number of people killed there is unknown, but is thought to number in the dozens.
Light shines through windows at the battery factory.
A chair stands below abandoned machinery at the factory.
About 17 Muslims from the area around Srebrenica were killed at this soccer field in Konjevic Polje.
The bodies of 34 people were thrown into a hole in Bisina cave.
Plants grow beside a wall at Petkovci dam, where between 1,000 and 1,500 Muslims were killed.
Clouds pass over a landfill site next to the Drina River in Kozluk where 1,000 Muslims were killed.
Feb 29 - March 1 - Bosnia's Muslims and Croats vote for independence in referendum boycotted by Serbs.
European Union recognises Bosnia's independence. War breaks out and Serbs, under the leadership of Radovan Karadzic, lay siege to capital Sarajevo. They occupy 70 percent of the country, killing and persecuting Muslims and Croats to carve out a Serb Republic.
The bodies of a man and a woman lie in the street in Sarajevo after shrapnel from a grenade hit them.
U.N. imposes sanctions on Serbia for backing rebel Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.
Bosnia peace efforts fail. War breaks out between Muslims and Croats, previously allied against Serbs.
The residents of Sarajevo take cover from sniper fire behind a United Nations Protection Force armoured vehicle.
The feet of a 10-year-old Bosnian Muslim boy Elvedin Sendo, clad in grass-stained running shoes and marked with his name tag, protrude from under a blanket at a hospital morgue in the besieged Bosnian capital.
Muslim women and children eat snow in order to quench their thirst in an overloaded UNHCR truck during evacuation from besieged Srebrenica.
Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde in eastern Bosnia are declared three of six U.N. "safe areas". The United Nations Protection Force deploys troops and Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) attacks stop. But the town remains isolated and only a few humanitarian convoys reach it in the following two years.
U.S.-brokered agreement ends Muslim-Croat war and creates a Muslim-Croat federation.
Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic orders that Srebrenica and Zepa be entirely cut off and aid convoys be stopped from reaching the towns.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic (right) and his general Ratko Mladic are seen on Mountain Vlasic.
Karadzic issues a new order to conquer Srebrenica.
Bosnian Serbs troops, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, capture the eastern enclave and U.N. "safe area" of Srebrenica, killing about 8,000 Muslim males in the following week. The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicts Karadzic and Mladic for genocide for the siege of Sarajevo.
A group of Bosnian Muslims, refugees from Srebrenica, make their way to be transported from eastern Bosnian village of Potocari to Kladanj near Olovo.
A Kenyan UN peacekeeper with his Dutch comrade give water to an elderly Bosnian Muslim woman, a refugee from Srebrenica, as she waits to be transported from Potocari.
NATO starts air strikes against Bosnian Serb troops.
Following NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic agree to a U.S.-brokered peace deal in Dayton, Ohio.
The three leaders sign the Dayton peace accords in Paris, paving the way for the arrival of a 66,000-strong NATO peacekeeping Implementation Force in Bosnia. The international community establishes a permanent presence in the country through the office of an international peace overseer.
A single army boot stands on the site where 2,000 people are believed to have been killed and buried in the eastern Bosnian village of Glogovo Selo near Srebrenica.
Bodies of Muslims killed during the exodus from Srebrenica discovered by the Hague war crimes tribunal experts are seen in a grave near the eastern Bosnian village of Nova Kasaba.
West forces Karadzic to quit as Bosnian Serb president.
Nationalist parties win first post-war election, confirming Bosnia's ethnic division.
Bosnian Muslims carry a small coffin with body of 40-days-old daughter of local Muslim priest. Hasib Ramic was killed together with his wife and four children in May, 1993.
Having lost power, Karadzic goes underground.
Bosnian pathologist Rifat Kesetovic examines skulls of victims taken from mass graves and in wooded areas following the 1995 massacre in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.
A Bosnian Muslim woman looks through the window of a bus as she arrives at Potocari in the wartime U.N. protected enclave of Srebrenica.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial charged with 66 counts of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
Aida Civic, a Bosnian Muslim refugee woman from Srebrenica, screams as she enters a container with the remains of around 3,500 killed Bosnian Muslims in an identification centre of the Institute for missing persons.
Ex-NATO commander tells the court Milosevic knew Bosnian Serbs planned to massacre Muslims in Bosnia in 1995.
In a belated abandonment of its endless denials and under strong international pressure, the Bosnian Serb government make a landmark admission - that Serbs indeed massacred thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica, on Karadzic's orders.
A Bosnian Muslim woman cries over the grave of her relative during a mass funeral.
Milosevic is found dead in his cell in The Hague.
Names of victims of the massacre are seen in front of their graves at a cemetery.
Women from Srebrenica react to television coverage from The International Court of Justice in front of a wall covered with pictures of their missing loved ones.
Bosnian Serb wartime president Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's most wanted men for planning and ordering genocide, is arrested.
Pro-Karadzic demonstrators confront Serbian riot police in Belgrade.
A Muslim woman prays beside the coffin of her relative among newly identified victims.
Ratko Mladic is arrested in Serbia. The Hague indicted Mladic in 1995 for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre.
Bosnian Muslims carry a coffin prepared for a mass burial.
A Muslim woman mourns by the coffin of her relative, among 775 newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, lined up for a joint burial in Potocari in this July 11, 2010 file photo. Twenty years ago on July 11, 1995, towards the end of Bosnia's 1992-95 war, Bosnian Serb forces swept into the eastern Srebrenica enclave, a U.N.-designated "safe haven". There they took 8,000 Muslim men and boys and executed them in the days that followed, dumping their bodies into pits in the surrounding forests.
A Bosnian Muslim man prays during a mass funeral for 175 newly identified victims.
Nearly 90 percent of the victims have been exhumed from mass graves and identified through DNA analysis.
