JULY 9 and 10

The ten-year commemoration of Srebrenica began on the morning of July 9 when thousands of people lined Maršala Tita Boulevard in Sarajevo to watch the passage of four trucks containing the 610 coffins to be buried on July 11. Survivors awaited the trucks that arrived in Potocari at 4:00 P.M. Bosnian Muslim men and boys formed a human chain to unload the coffins from the trucks and carefully place them in rows in one of the buildings of the old battery factory, which served as the headquarters of the Dutch peacekeepers. Each coffin was numbered according to its location of burial in the cemetery, and all the grave markers were also stored in this building. Survivors entered the building throughout the afternoon and evening to seek the coffins containing the remains of their relatives. The coffins are made of wooden planks and cloth material through which one may see the plastic in which the identified remains are wrapped. Heavy rains prevented the coffins from being placed along their grave sites. They were instead laid out in rows, in numerical order, in the open field portion of the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery on the night of July 10, during which women held an evening prayer. These coffins are at the center of a continually unfolding story of denial and revelation: the denial of the crimes committed in July 1995, the discovery and exhumation of concealed mass graves, and the scientific identification of the victims and now silent witnesses of these crimes.