The Potocari memorial center sits amidst lush countryside and thickly forested hills. On a hot summer’s day, the scent of cut grass and clover drifts over the graveyard where thousands of plain white tombstones stretch out into the distance.
Each year on July 11, the memorial day for the Srebrenica genocide, more fragments of human remains unearthed from the ongoing excavations of mass graves are laid to rest here. This year, there were 33 burials, two and half decades after the victims’ deaths.
A former factory complex, Potocari was where the UN’s Dutch battalion was stationed in 1995 and to where local Muslims fled in the vain hope of protection when Bosnian Serb forces moved on the Bosnian Muslim enclave.