SREBRENICA, July 4, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Ten years after the worst massacre in European history, survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica carnage still have moving stories to tell about the slaughtering of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serbian forces, as other pray for the day when they return home.

“I was saved by God ... spared to bear witness to genocide,” Mevludin Oric, who believes he received the gift of life so he could testify about the horrors he had seen, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Tens of thousands of people are expected to commemorate on July 11 the anniversary of the savage bloodletting.

In honor of those who did not make it to safety, some survivors are organizing this July 8 a march of survivors of the “trail of death.”

Oric was 25 when the eastern Bosnian town fell to Serb forces on July 11 1995.

He was captured while trying to escape to safety through Serb-held forests and taken to a school gym in the nearby village of Grbavci where some 2,500 Muslims had already been imprisoned.

“We were there until (Bosnian Serb general Ratko) Mladic arrived. He looked around, talked to the guards and laughed. As he left we were ordered to crawl to the exit,” Oric recalled.

Outside, prisoners were packed on to trucks after their hands had been bound and eyes covered. Oric and his nephew Haris were on the same truck.

“They took us to a field. Haris asked me if they were going to kill us and just as I said 'no' a machine gun started.”

Oric, who occasionally paused while recounting his ordeal to sigh, said he threw himself on the ground, unhurt. Hit by a bullet, his nephew fell on top of him and died.

Oric spent the whole day lying under Haris's body, listening to the sounds of buses bringing men to execution, machine gun fire and screams of pain.

At one point, Serbian soldiers began shooting dead and half-dead men through the head, but Oric was again spared.

He, along with a few others, walked through forests to avoid Serb soldiers, but were shot at on several occasions during their 10-day journey to safety.

The search for mass graves of Muslim victims continues.

The majority of Srebrenica's 28,000 Muslim pre-war inhabitants still live elsewhere, but few of them opted to return home.

“Srebrenica is where the best and the worst moments of my life have taken place, I could not live anywhere else,” said Serif Begic, who was among the men who fled to the forests accompanied by his father and brother.

Hatidza Mehmedovic returned three years ago. She lives alone in a house she used to share with her husband and two sons, all three killed in July 1995.

So far she has not found their bodies.

“My heart was ripped out in 1995 ... I am alone here, I will be alone for the rest of my days, no matter where I am,” Mehmedovic said.

The only thing left to Mehmedovic by her sons, who were 17 and 19 when they were killed, are three pine trees they planted in the garden of the house.

“The first thing I do in the morning is to open the window and look at these trees, imagining I was with my sons,” she said.

“When they were babies I had dreams about seeing them getting married, I could not have imagined that instead of making wedding plans I would be waiting for their bodies to be found.”

And despite similar painful memories, for Sanja Purkovic, who returned in 2002, reconciliation between the two communities is possible.

“Even those who lost their loved ones agree that not all Serbs are criminals,” Purkovic said.

Under the 1995 Dayton peace accords Srebrenica was made part of the Serb-run entity of Republika Srpska which along with the Muslim-Croat federation makes up post-war Bosnia.

Out of 28,000 Muslims living in the city before the war according to the last census in 1991 only 4,000 have returned so far.

The Serbian population in Srebrenica was 9,000 before the war.

The massacre survivors hope that war criminals like Radovan Karadzic and Ratok Mladic, considered as the architects of the massacre, will be brought to justice.

Serbs woke up on June 9 to a gruesome video showing members of Serbian paramilitary units executing Muslim civilians near Srebrenica.

The video -- shown first at the trial of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic at the UN war crimes tribunal and later broadcast by several Serbian television stations -- prompted the police to arrest several suspects.

But, for the first time since the end of the Bosnian war, it has avalanched countless reactions among the citizens, until then mainly denying Serb forces' involvement in the killings and contesting the civilian status of the victims.

Belgrade independent TV station B92 will broadcast live the ceremony of the 10^{th anniversary, with many newspapers sending their reporters to Srebrenica, most of them for the first time since 1995.}

And top Serbian officials led by President Boris Tadic will attend the ceremony marking the anniversary of the massacre.

Over 570 victims of the massacre -- aged between 14 and 75 -- are due to be buried at a memorial cemetery in Potocari during the ceremony.

Their bodies were found in some of more than 60 mass graves which have been exhumed around Srebrenica.

More than 1,300 victims have been buried at the memorial cemetery, built in 2003, but thousands of others have yet to be identified as the search for more burial sites continues.