Victims of Europe's worst massacre since the second World War will be buried in a special ceremony next week. Ten years on, Daniel McLaughlin, in Srebrenica talks to some of the survivors.
The battery factory at Potocari has seen many better days, and some that were far worse. It used to employ hundreds of people from villages in this serpentine valley, where Serbs and Muslims have lived together for centuries. Now, the drip of rainwater echoes through its vast halls, machines crouch abandoned in the dust, and only stray dogs move between the smoke-blackened walls.
The worst days engulfed the factory a decade ago. It was to here that 25,000 Muslim refugees fled when the Bosnian Serb army began its final onslaught against Srebrenica, a once-tranquil spa town a handful of kilometres down the road, which the UN had declared a "safe haven".
They came to beg for the protection of a UN battalion that hade made the battery plant their base, and to where they had beaten an ignominious retreat from the marauding troops of General Ratko Mladic.
The first 5,000 civilians crammed inside the sweltering factory while the rest - with the safety of Muslim-held territory some 60 miles away across the hills - gathered on the ground outside, hoping the world would keep its promise to halt the Serb advance.
They waited while the vastly outnumbered Dutch UN contingent pleaded for NATO air strikes on Serb positions, and while French General Bernard Janvier, the head of UN forces in former Yugoslavia, complained that their request was submitted on the wrong form. His prevarication, perhaps, sealed the fate of the Muslims of Srebrenica.
When Gen Mladic swaggered up to the factory on July 11th, he held the lives of the desperate Muslims, and the Dutch troops, in his palm.
He patted a little boy on the head and assured wailing mothers that everything would be fine, their safety was guaranteed, as long as Srebrenica's vanquished defenders handed over all their weapons: "Allah can't help you but Mladic can!" he declared.
For Serb television, he made his real intentions clear: "It is time to take revenge on the Turks," he said, evoking the centuries of Ottoman rule that brought Islam to Bosnia, and still rankle with nationalists Serbs.
Over the next few days - in schools, warehouses, on farms and playing fields around Srebrenica - Mladic's men massacred their male prisoners. Across the thickly wooded hillsides that surround the old silver-mining town, Serbs hunted down thousands of Muslims as they strove for the safety of Tuzla, far to the north.
"After leaving to come here, I never saw my husband and two sons again," recalls Hatija Mehmedovich, standing outside the glowering shell of the old battery factory. "My youngest boy - he was 21 - covered his eyes and said, 'Mum, go to Potocari, but I don't want to see you leave.' I hope no one ever has to endure a farewell like that." Hatija (57) runs the Women of Srebrenica group, which campaigns on behalf of bereaved Muslim women and helps them find their relatives' remains.
ALMOST 8,000 PEOPLE were murdered in Europe's worst massacre since the second World War, but the bodies of only 2,070 have been identified by international DNA experts.
"They sentenced our husbands and boys to death that day, but we live with that judgement for our whole lives," says Hatija. "I try not to feel rancour towards the Serbs now. But many of us still do."
Mehmedovich is still searching for her husband and sons, but will bury her brother on Monday, 10 years after Gen Mladic took Srebrenica and the massacre began. He will be laid in one of some 600 graves that are being dug at the Potocari Memorial Centre, a cemetery across the road from the ruined battery plant, where foreign dignitaries will join thousands of victims' relatives for the commemoration.
In Srebrenica, no one expects the event to change their lives. The town and surrounding area were once home to 37,000 people, about 80 per cent of whom were Muslim. Now, less than 10,000 people live here, and the large majority are Serbs. Only one person in five has a job.
Most Muslims here just want to get on with life, and not rock the boat with Serbs who, for the most part, are unwilling to talk about what happened 10 years ago.
Some buildings in Srebrenica have been pristinely repaired; others are still chewed by bullet holes and blackened by the scorch marks of explosions and fire. But in the cafes, the shops and on the building sites, there is life, and optimism.
"When I came back in 2002, things were much worse than now," says Sadik Salimovich, a Muslim who publishes Srebrenica's monthly newspaper, Zurnal, with a Serb friend. "The town used to look crushed by what had happened here. Now things are coming back to life,"
"Serbs used to be afraid to talk to me. Now reconciliation is growing. Old friendships are returning and new ones are being born. The war was tough on everyone."
In her little salon, Amira Markovic watches her daughter cut a client's hair.
"There were always good, normal people here, and the place was beautiful - I couldn't understand what happened when war started in 1992,". She is a Muslim, and fled Srebrenica to stay with her Serb husband's relatives.
"I came back in 2003 and couldn't recognise the place. But now things are on the up."
Outside the salon, Rizafeta Husic flags down a pick-up truck loaded with building supplies, and gives the driver directions to the house she abandoned during the war.
"It was beautiful here before. Everyone had jobs and good friends," she says. "Now I live two hours away, and there's no work there." She is rebuilding her house with help with one of the many grants available to refugees from Srebrenica. But, even when it is ready, she may not return. "I don't know, I'm still afraid somehow," she says. "I don't really trust my neighbours."
THAT MISTRUST IS mutual. In Bratunac, a town near Potocari that was a base for Mladic's men, Vinko Lale rails against what he calls the world's indifference to Serb suffering.
"For every memorial to Serb war victims there are 10 for the Muslims, for every grant to help us, there are 10 for them, for every one Muslim sent to The Hague, 10 Serbs are extradited," he says, referring to the site of the UN's war crimes tribunal. "Why does no one talk about the crimes of the Muslim fighters from Srebrenica, about why the UN let them keep their weapons in a so-called 'safe haven', and how they used them to attack Serb villages and torture, rape and murder ordinary Serbs."
Lale reserves his greatest wrath for Naser Oric, the one-time bodyguard of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who co-ordinated the defence of Srebrenica and is now on trial for war crimes. Lale produces photographs of people he calls Oric's victims: decapitated and castrated men, and women he says were raped before being executed by Muslim soldiers.
"The world has only had time and money for the Muslim memorial at Potocari. It hasn't understood what Serbs suffered, and so no one helps us build our own memorial," he says. "Is it any wonder that Serbs and Muslims hardly have any contact here now?"
Mr Lale and his allies had hoped to open their memorial to more than 3,000 Serb dead on July 12th, the day after the Potocari event. As it is, while thousands gather to mourn Srebrenica's Muslims, a few Serb volunteers will chisel away at the large concrete cross they have erected in the village of Kravica.
NEAR THE POTOCARI cemetery, a Slovenian firm has just opened a factory to make car parts. Lord Paddy Ashdown, the international community's High Representative for Bosnia, called it "a first bright beam of sunlight after a dark, dark night," in the country.
He said he hoped it would bring together Serbs and Muslims who have not worked side-by-side since the battery factory became an annexe for death, in a region where "justice, truth, reconciliation and recovery must be the key words." Reminders of death and life mingle everywhere here: the crowding hills and dark valleys promise secrecy and forgetting, while houses still carry their bullet holes like a fresh wound.
In Kravica, there is a low, flat building that was an agricultural warehouse before Serbs used it as a place to kill hundreds of Muslims.
Even though bullet holes still riddle the blackened walls, it seems to be returning to its old life. A farmer's tools are propped up at the door and horse manure covers the floor. The sound of work drifts in from the fields outside. A swallow flies in through a shattered window, sheers through the darkness, and disappears back out into the light.