Sarajevo - More than 30,000 people were expected to come Wednesday to the Potocari memorial centre near the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica to commemorate the 12th anniversary of a massacre in the former eastern Bosnian Muslim enclave. A total of 465 victims of the Srebrenica massacre who have been identified would be buried during the commemoration, which would also be attended by a number of local and international dignitaries, including the Chief Prosecutor of the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Carla Del Ponte.
In honour to all victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina's central government, the Council of Ministers, declared Wednesday a day of national mourning.
Hours before the commemoration ceremony and burial of the victims, Bosnian forensic experts were due to commence the exhumation of the bodies of the Srebrenica victims from a mass grave in Budak, near the memorial centre.
Several dozen bodies are expected to be found in the grave, according to the Bosnian Commission on Missing Persons.
Some 2,600 Srebrenica victims have already been buried in Potocari since the memorial was opened four years ago.
The remains of an unknown number of victims exhumed from more than 60 mass graves discovered in the Srebrenica area during the last decade, and currently packed in more than 5,000 bags, are still awaiting identification and proper burial.
Up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men were killed after Bosnian Serb troops captured the enclave of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
More than 30,000 women, children and elderly people were expelled from the area.
The entire enclave of Srebrenica was under the protection of the United Nations as a "UN safe zone" at the time when the massacre occurred.
Some 150 Dutch soldiers were deployed in the area to protect the local population from possible slaughter.
Despite the fact that massive movements of Serb troops were spotted, the UN did not order airstrikes and failed to provide protection for Srebrenica's citizens as it had promised.
Soon after troops led by Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic captured Srebrenica, Dutch UN troops left the area, leaving the local Muslim population at the mercy of the Bosnian Serb soldiers.
The Bosnian Serb troops' massive execution of Muslim men would be remembered as the worst atrocity since World War II.
Less than seven years after the massacre, the Dutch government of the then prime minister Wim Kok resigned following criticism over the Dutch troops' failure to prevent the bloodshed.
The survivors of the massacre sued the Dutch government and the UN, seeking compensation and moral satisfaction for their failure to protect the population of the enclave.
Early in 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that genocide was committed in Srebrenica in July 1995, accusing the wartime Bosnian Serb authorities for that.
The masterminds of the massacre, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Mladic, remain at large nearly 12 years after The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted them for war crimes and genocide.
