BOSNIA: They began their day in a storm, dawn rain soaking their march towards Srebrenica, and ended it burying their loved ones as the sodden Bosnian soil sucked at their best shoes.
Ten years after 25,000 Bosnian Muslims sought refuge here, at a UN base that promised refuge from Serb troops, a similar number gathered yesterday to remember the massacre that followed, and to belatedly bury 610 of the almost 8,000 who perished.
Where Gen Ratko Mladic's men fired the first shots of the slaughter, only the Muslim call to prayer drifted out across the green hills, whose slopes were covered with mourners gazing down on the ceremony below.
Many of them began their journey before first light, congregating in squares, bus stations and mosques across Bosnia before joining a convoy of thousands of vehicles on the road to Srebrenica.
Thousands ended up walking the final miles to the cemetery at nearby Potocari, and arrived with their blue-and-yellow Bosnian flags, which flew alongside a few red-and-white Turkish banners, fluttering in another shower of rain.
Old women in their finest clothes mourned murdered husbands, sons and even grandsons, while young men who escaped the slaughter wore T-shirts bearing the image of Naser Oric, the main Muslim defender of Srebrenica, whom Serbs accuse of war crimes.
In helicopters and high-speed convoys, and amid tight security after bombs were discovered here last week, international dignitaries joined the lament for the victims and the continuing freedom of the men accused of being ultimately to blame for their murder.
"It is to the shame of the international community that this evil happened under our noses and we did nothing like enough to stop it," said Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary.
"I bitterly regret this and am deeply sorry for it." Mr Straw said it was "sickening" that, a decade on, Bosnian Serb commander Gen Mladic and his wartime political boss, Radovan Karadzic, were still on the run from the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
"The quest for justice will remain incomplete," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in a statement read out at the ceremony, "while Karadzic and Mladic remain at-large." "Our first duty is to remember what happened," Mr Annan said. "For us who serve the UN, that truth is a hard one to face." The failure of the UN to help a vastly outnumbered Dutch contingent of its troops protect the so-called safe haven of Srebrenica is one of the organisation's darkest episodes.
"The great nations failed to respond adequately," acknowledged Mr Annan. "We should have had stronger forces in place and the will to use them."
Sulejman Tihic, the Muslim member of the Bosnian presidency that also includes Serb and Croat representatives, was equally damning: "The UN failed to protect its safe haven. They surrendered it to the Bosnian Serbs who committed genocide and killed at least 7,808 Bosnian Muslims." The US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, Pierre-Richard Prosper, read a message from President Bush, stressing that America "remains committed" to having Karadzic and Mladic brought to justice.
Serbian President Boris Tadic laid a wreath at the memorial, a significant gesture given Serbia's political and military backing of the Bosnian Serbs during the war, under former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
"It is necessary to establish full trust and co-operation in the region," Mr Tadic said in a statement, amid criticism from Serbia's influential hardline nationalists for attending the ceremony. "We have to break the circle of evil on the Balkans."
In Belgrade, the Serbian parliament failed to specifically mention Srebrenica when it held a minute of silence to honour the victims of the Balkan wars, as well as those of last week's bomb attacks in London.
At Potocari, men washed their hands at huge water tankers before the funeral ceremony, when thousands of people across surrounding hillsides joined them in praying towards Mecca, gazing beyond an abandoned factory where the Serbs separated the men and boys from their women.
Yesterday, some were reunited, as 610 green coffins were passed above the heads of the mourners and lowered into waiting graves.
But the reunion was brief and, for many, justice is still painfully elusive.
"There can be no peace and reconciliation with the Serbs while Mladic and Karadzic are running free," said Dzelil Nalic, who was only 15 when Bosnian Serb forces executed his father and 24 other male relatives.
"My wounds will heal only when the monsters rot in prison."
A defence witness at the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic denied yesterday Bosnian Serb forces slaughtered 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica 10 years ago.
"I accept that two to three thousand Serbs were killed in the Srebrenica area and several thousand Muslims, but most of them were killed in fighting," said Bozidar Delic, a retired Yugoslav army general, has been on the stand for several weeks testifying in Milosevic's defence about the Kosovo war in 1999, when he was an army commander.