47 GENOCIDE VICTIMS BURIED IN BRCKO

BRCKO, Bosnia (June 16,2008) - More than 5,000 Bosnians attended the funeral Saturday of 47 genocide victims from the northern Bosnian town of Brcko.They were mass murdered by the genocidal Serbian fascist aggressor in Brcko at the beginning of the 1992-95 Serbian aggression against Bosnia.

The remains of 47 Bosnian civilians were among 277 found in a mass grave in nearby Gorice. About 80 bodies of genocide victims had previously been identified and buried.

More than 500 Bosnian civilians from Brcko remain missing since the war, during which the genocidal Serbian fascist aggressor's forces captured the Bosnian town and expelled or mass murdered all Bosnian civilians.

The youngest person buried Saturday, 13-year-old Elizabeta Calukovic, was laid to rest next to her father and stepmother.

Her mother, Hanumka Mujkanovic, was in Croatia when the Serbian aggression against Bosnia started. She said she gave all her jewelry to a friend who said he would bring the girl and her father to Croatia, but they never arrived.

Mujkanovic, 53, said she thought her ex-husband had decided to take Elizabeta away from her and had started a new life somewhere in the world with the girl and his wife.

"I looked for her all over the world for years," Mujkanovic said. "But then in February I was informed that Elizabeta, her father and his wife were among the bodies in the mass grave."

Amela Sabanovic, 23, came to bury her father Midhat.

"For 16 years our souls have been seeking peace. We hoped at the beginning that we would find him alive. Then we realized we were searching most likely for his body," she said.

"The perpetrators must be found and punished," Sabanovic said. "A crime without punishment is just an announcement of another crime."

Only four Serbian war criminals have so far received jail sentences for the genocide committed against Bosnian civilians in Brcko.

The devastating genocide in Bosnia was labeled 'ethnic cleansing' by the Serbian fascists; a term accepted by the USA and other members of the UN Security Council to avoid any reference to 'genocide', which would by international law demand their intervention.

In July 1995 the genocidal Serbian fascist aggressor mass murdered up to 10,000 Bosnian civilians from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica.The Srebrenica massacre has been finally deemed by the UN war crimes tribunal and the International Court of Justice to have constituted genocide.

In 1999 the UN owned up to its shame regarding its failure to protect the victims of the fall of Srebrenica. 'Through error, misjudgment, and an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder.'

There are still 20,000 people listed as missing in Bosnia. Hope now lies in the science of DNA, which can match profiles taken from remains of the genocide victims with others taken from living relatives providing a grain of solace to those who lost their loved ones to genocide.
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