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Hundreds from Srebrenica massacre reburied


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Dec. 23: To get a taste of what life is like for the poor, Britain’s Prince William spends a night on a London street. Meantime, are wedding bells in the future for Prince Harry? NBC’s Stephanie Gosk reports from Buckingham Palace.

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Dark mark in U.N. history
For the past few days, he walked the escape route the other way from Tuzla to Srebrenica and arrived for the anniversary.

"I don't remember anything and wanted to see where it happened. The Serbs shelled our group and killed dad while he was holding me in his arms. Someone else, I don't know who, carried me the rest of the way to Tuzla," he says.

The body of Hazim's father, Edhem, was found in a mass grave along the route and buried last year in Potocari.

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Srebrenica was described by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the darkest page of U.N. history.

Mladic and the former Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, both indicted for genocide, are still in hiding. Mladic is believed to be in Serbia, while Karadzic's whereabouts are unknown.

A divided nation
Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, attended Wednesday's ceremony. She has been pressing for the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic for years.

Muslim Bosnians have cited the massacre in their arguments for ending the country's postwar territorial division. The peace accord that ended the war divided the once multiethnic country into two ministates — one for Orthodox Christian Serbs and the other shared by Muslim Bosnians and Catholic Croats.

Srebrenica ended up in Serb-controlled territory of the ministate called Republika Srpska, or the Serb Republic. Muslim Bosnians consider the existence of Republika Srpska an award for the perpetrators, achieved through genocide.

"These innocent victims fell because of a project not worthy of humankind," said Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim member of Bosnia's three-person, multiethnic presidency. He called for the division to be dismantled and "for Bosnia not to be the way the perpetrators of this crime wanted it to be."

His Croat colleague in the presidency attended the ceremony, but his Serb colleague did not.

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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