SREBRENICA, Bosnia, 11 July 2005 — Survivors of the Muslim flight from Srebrenica came back yesterday to the scene of the massacre to bury some of the 10,000 men shot and bulldozed into the earth by Bosnian Serb forces 10 years ago this week.

The living and the remains of the dead converged on the grim eastern Bosnia town for today’s anniversary ceremony. Hundreds retraced their harrowing escape under fire across Serb-held territory to join hundreds last seen being led off to slaughter.

Up to 50,000 mourners were expected at the memorial for Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, among them former US Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke who brokered the Dayton Accords to bring Bosnia an uneasy peace.

Serbian President Boris Tadic also planned to attend, though some Muslims said they would not welcome him and some Serb hard-liners said he should not go.

Over 1,500 Bosnian Serb police backed by European Union troops were to enforce security, heightened by the discovery near the site last week of two large bombs “ready to detonate”. The massacre, in the final two months of a 43-month war, aimed to ensure there were no Muslims to fight back or claim back Serb-occupied land or homes in the future.

Bosnian Serb Army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and the rebel state’s “president”, Radovan Karadzic, are indicted for genocide for the atrocity. But to the anger of Bosnians and the embarrassment of Western powers who intervened belatedly to stop the war which claimed 200,000 lives, both remain at large.

Silent crowds watched in Sarajevo on Saturday as a convoy passed by bearing 610 coffins of massacre remains identified by DNA analysis. Women wept at the waiting graves in Srebrenica cemetery, each bearing a plain green marker with a number.

In the verdant hills nearby, survivors recalled how death from Serb mortars, shelling and snipers decimated the columns who managed to escape when Bosnian Serb troops brushed aside a Dutch UN force to overrun the Srebrenica “safe area”.

“This is just a dirt road. But for me it’s the most beautiful highway in the world, the road of life that I covered with my friends who are gone now,” said Muhamed Omerovic, who was 21 when he last saw the escape route from Srebrenica.

Exhausted by their emotional three-day trek, the survivors said a prayer for the dead at a newly opened mass grave where forensic experts expect to find at least 50 more bodies.

The 18 by 3 meter pit will be shown today. Pasa Djanic, 68, visits all mass graves looking for the body of her son Esad who went missing from Srebrenica 10 years ago.

“I go from grave to grave, hoping to finally find his bones,” she said looking down among skulls and ribs.

Some 2,000 Srebrenica victims from mass graves have been reburied, but 7,000 body bags have still to be analyzed and 20 more mass graves to be exhumed. A newly discovered grave in the process of being exhumed was to be displayed today.

The evidence has little impact on those Serbs who insist the killing was simply a hard fact of war, or a justifiable act of revenge, or who deny the massacre outright.

Srebrenica today is a dismal, half-empty town in the “Republika Srpska” or Serb Republic half of Bosnia, which last year had to be coerced into acknowledging the massacre and taking responsibility for it.