(9 Jul 2012) Hundreds of people lined Sarajevo's main street on Monday as trucks bearing 520 coffins passed through on their way to Srebrenica, where the newly identified victims of Europe's worst massacre since World War II will be buried.
The weeping crowd tucked flowers into canvas covering the trucks as they drove down a street sprinkled with ceremonial rose water.
The convoy drove through the capital as the war crimes trial of the former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic resumed in The Hague.
Mladic faces charges including genocide for allegedly overseeing the massacre of at least 8-thousand Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
He denies wrongdoing.
The 520 sets of remains, identified through DNA tests, will be buried at a memorial centre near Srebrenica on the 17th anniversary of the massacre of 8-thousand men and boys, defined by the International Court of Justice as genocide.
The bodies have been excavated for years.
The perpetrators secretly dug up the original mass graves with bulldozers, then drove decomposing remains to other locations and buried them there.
While waiting for the coffins at the memorial centre near Srebrenica, Suhreta Malic visited the graves of her two sons who died in the massacre.
Malic believes The Hague is not the right venue for Mladic, who's on trial with former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
"They should bring him here," Malic said.
Every year tens of thousands of people gather on July 11 in Srebrenica for the funeral of hundreds of victims.
Another Srebrenica mother Rahima Mustafic lost several members family when Serb troops overran the town in 1995.
Mustafic hopes that Mladic "never sees his children again".
"My son has never seen his father. We only found four bones of his and we will bury those now, nothing else," she said.
In the Serb-dominated Bosnian town of Pale, residents on Monday expressed very different opinions of Mladic.
"It does not matter that he is in the Hague. He is a Serb hero forever," said Ljeposava Pandurevic.
Lawyers for Mladic asked judges on Monday to adjourn the case for six months, just hours before the first witness was due to take the stand, saying recent changes in rules for tendering evidence would "result in an extreme miscarriage of justice."
Mladic's trial started on May 16, but was almost immediately halted because prosecutors admitted that an apparent clerical error meant they failed to disclose to defence lawyers thousands of pages of evidence.


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