A tear rolls down Sabaheta Fejzic's cheek as she twists open the blue tin of hand cream and gazes at the fingertip tracks left by her son. The 17-year-old and his father have never been seen since they were taken away to the factory where Europe's worst massacre since World War II was being perpetrated.
Nearly 8,000 people died in the five-day bloodbath of Srebrenica that was set in motion 10 years ago on Monday with the Bosnian-Serb capture of the town from UN peacekeepers. Over the next two days, troops rounded up the town's males, shot all who couldn't flee and scattered their remains in dozens of mass graves that are still turning up today.
Srebrenica was supposed to be a UN "safe haven" but its 600 Dutch peacekeepers, outmanned and outgunned, could only watch as soldiers supervised by Bosnian-Serb General Ratko Mladic separated men from women and children at a factory in the suburb of Potocari.
Ten years later, Srebrenica remains an emblem of a three-and-a-half-year war that left 260,000 dead and 20,000 missing. Even now some 800,000 remain uprooted, often -- as in the case of Srebrenica's Muslims -- afraid to go back to towns now run by their former enemies.
Rijad, Fejzic's only child, was taken from his mother on the morning of July 12. As the Serbs led him away, she grabbed his belt pack to hold him back. It broke off in her hands.
Opening it later, she found music cassettes of Dire Straits and Bosnian rockers, and the half-used Nivea tin.
"When you lift the lid you can see the traces of his fingertips in the cream," she says, searching for a tissue to catch her tears.
Bosnia now is united, on paper, as a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation. But it still needs international supervision enforced by armed foreign peacekeepers to keep its ethnic groups working together in a central government.
Already inefficient before the war, its post-communist economy remains dependent on outside help.
The strong sense of accounts unsettled is highlighted by NATO forces' failure to capture Mladic, as well as the wartime Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, so that they can be tried for the Srebrenica massacre and other war crimes.
The US Congress recently passed a resolution deeming the Srebrenica killings to be genocide and demanding the perpetrators be punished.
But a text with the same message was voted down in Bosnia's federal parliament by Bosnian Serb lawmakers.
Still, after nearly a decade of denial, Serbs are starting to come to grips with their wartime conduct.
The evidence has become impossible to ignore, now that ordinary Serbs have seen TV footage of Srebrenica's victims being rounded up and shot.
Screened last month, the video has poked huge holes in the Serb nationalist spin on the Bosnian and other Balkan wars -- that Serbs were the victims and other ethnic groups the perpetrators.
The president of now defunct Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, was ousted by street protesters in 2001 and is on trial for war crimes in The Hague, Netherlands, and Monday's memorial in Srebrenica will for the first time be attended by a Serbian president, the pro-Western Boris Tadic. Organizers expect 50,000 people to show up.
In Belgrade, capital of neighboring Serbia, billboards have been put up by a human-rights group as a reminder of the Srebrenica anniversary.
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