SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Hercegovina, 21 September 2003 — Former US President Bill Clinton yesterday urged reconciliation among Bosnia’s three ethnic communities at the site of Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II, calling for the arrest of those responsible for the Srebrenica massacre.

“For much of its history Bosniacs (Muslims), Croats and Serbs have lived together in peace,” Clinton said at a ceremony marking the opening of a memorial cemetery for the more than 7,000 victims, attended by some 20,000 Bosnian Muslims.

He stressed that the US-brokered peace agreement ending Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, which pitted the three ethnic communities against each other, gave people “a chance but not the guarantee to live that way once again.”

“I hope you can build on the bedrock of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Hercegovina a place where all children are safe and loved and able to live out their dreams,” he stressed, speaking on a stage in front of which the remains of 107 Srebrenica victims, wrapped in green cloth, were placed on the ground before burial.

But the former president stressed that those allegedly responsible for the massacre, which he described as a “genocidal madness,” were still on the run, more than eight years after Srebrenica.

“Those most responsible for the atrocities, the leaders have not been apprehended. The search for them must continue until they are,” Clinton said, in a clear reference to Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and Mladic, his army chief, were indicted in 1995 by a UN court in The Hague for genocide and war crimes allegedly committed during Bosnia’s war, notably in Srebrenica.

Clinton, president from 1993 to 2001, was invited by survivors of the Srebrenica slaughter to open the memorial because of his contribution to ending the war, which claimed more than 200,000 lives.

More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys are believed to have been summarily executed in July 1995 in just a few days after Serb forces overran the eastern enclave in Bosnia, which was a declared UN safe area at the time.

Clinton, who arrived from Sarajevo after a stopover in Kosovo on Friday, also met with representatives of the victims’ families.

The 107 victims buried yesterday at the memorial cemetery in Potocari, just outside Srebrenica, were aged between 16 and 75.

They were identified after being exhumed from several mass graves in the region.

After he laid a wreath at the cemetery, Clinton took a shovel and helped a Muslim family to lay to rest its three male members — Selim Delic, and his three sons — Aziz, Azem and Eniz, who were 33, 25 and 20 years old respectively when they were killed.

“It is hard for me to explain how I feel. It is so sad, but it is better to have found them late rather than never,” Hazim Delic, 31, the fourth brother who survived the massacre along with his mother, told AFP earlier.

He said his mother was not at the ceremony because “she simply did not have the strength.”

Sulejman Tihic, a Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, voiced hope that the “time will come when a Serb Willy Brandt will appear who will officially, on behalf of the Serb people, condemn this crime and also all the other crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina.”

He was referring to the former West German Chancellor who knelt at the memorial of the Warsaw ghetto to apologize for the Nazis’ actions.

Although most Bosnian Serbs were unhappy with Clinton’s visit, considering it to be a clear sign of his support for Muslims, some took a more cynical attitude.

“Clinton is not coming here for us or for them, but rather so that his picture from Srebrenica will be broadcast in the United States,” said Novo Mladenovic.

His visit takes place as Clinton reemerges on the US political scene to boost Democratic candidates against their Republican rivals as party politics heats up ahead of presidential elections in November 2004.

Clinton was the key advocate of NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serbs in September 1995 that forced them to sit down at the negotiating table.

The Bosnian war ended after marathon US-led negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, and the subsequent accord split Bosnia into two highly-autonomous entities — the Serbs’ Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

Some 2,000 police backed by NATO-led peacekeepers provided security for the ceremony in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, with 100 international and local officials also in attendance, including Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Dragan Mikerevic.