But Fatima Budic was alone with her grief.
Budic huddled over the coffin of her 14-year-old son as the sound of Muslim prayer echoed through a loudspeaker across Srebrenica's valley. Family members wandered between the 610 caskets laid out in the town's Memorial Center containing the remains of the most recently identified victims.
"They killed my entire life and the only thing I want now is to see the guilty ones pay for it," sobbed Budic, next to the coffin of her son Velija. Budic's husband and Velija's 16-year-old brother have never been found.
After a religious service, the caskets of the 610 most recently identified victims were passed in a long line from hand to hand toward the grave pits and buried. The sound of dirt banging against the coffins and the weeping of women competed with a female voice reading out the names of the victims.
Government leaders and dignitaries were among the crowd gathered to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the killings that began July 11, 1995, when Bosnian Serb soldiers overran Srebrenica - a U.N. "safe zone." Outgunned Dutch U.N. troops watched as the men were separated from the women. The men and boys were led off and slaughtered, and their bodies dumped in mass graves throughout eastern Bosnia.
Forensics experts so far have exhumed more than 5,000 bodies, and identified 2,032 through DNA analysis and other techniques. More than 1,300 Srebrenica victims are already buried at the cemetery that is part of the Memorial Center.
While the slaughter spurred NATO bombings of Serb positions across Bosnia that forced the Serbs to seek peace, government leaders and their representatives on Monday acknowledged the world's failure to stop the killing - and expressed regrets in deeply personal terms.
"It is to the shame of the international community that this evil took place under our noses and we did nothing," said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "I bitterly regret this and I'm deeply sorry for it."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed "solidarity" with the relatives in a message read out at the ceremony and drew parallels between the ethnic intolerance that spurred the Bosnian war and the terrorist bombings in London on Thursday that left dozens dead and hundreds injured.
"The bombers seek to provoke hatred between religions and cultures," he said. "It is our duty to humanity to ensure they never succeed."
Paddy Ashdown, Bosnia's international administrator, described Srebrenica as the "worst crime to take place in Europe in the latter part of the 20th century" - and the international community's failure to stop as "our greatest shame."
He and other senior officials at the ceremony viewed graphic evidence of the killings - a nearby mass grave containing the jumbled bones of some 30 victims.
Outside, families of the dead hoisted a huge banner that read: "Europe's shame - genocide."
The Srebrenica victims were among some 250,000 people killed in the 1992-95 war among Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. About 16,500 bodies have been exhumed from more than 300 mass graves throughout the country.
The alleged masterminds of the July 11, 1995, massacre - Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic - have been indicted by the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, for genocide and crimes against humanity at Srebrenica and elsewhere. Both are still at large.
The U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, Pierre-Richard Prosper, read a message from U.S. President George W. Bush stressing that America "remains committed" to having Karadzic and Mladic be brought to justice.
Serbian President Boris Tadic laid a wreath and stood silently before a memorial - a significant gesture given Serbia's political and military backing of the Bosnian Serbs during the war under former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The former president is now being tried by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for his alleged role in atrocities during Bosnian war and other Balkan bloodshed.
"It is necessary to establish full trust and cooperation in the region," Tadic said in a statement issued Sunday. "We have to break the circle of evil on the Balkans."
Tadic, who did not speak at the ceremony, has faced criticism from Serbia's hard-line nationalists for his decision to attend the commemoration.
The three-hour ceremony was broadcast live in Serbia, which was confronted with the horrors of Srebrenica in recent weeks, when a videotape showing the slaying of six men and boys shocked a country that had been largely uninformed about the atrocities committed by Serb troops in Bosnia.
The outpouring of grief to mark 10 years after was massive: the crowd was initially estimated at 50,000, though Bosnian Serb police later said the number was 30,000.
Among other officials attending were members of Bosnia's three-person presidency, which governs the country divided by the U.S.-brokered peace agreement, as well as Croatia's President Stipe Mesic, and the head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz.
