"I forgot to wave goodbye when they separated us. As he was walking away I shouted 'Samir!' and he turned around so that I caught a glimpse of his profile. That was the last time I saw him . . . there is not a morning or evening that goes by that I do not think of that moment."

Countless women lost husbands, sons and brothers during the Bosnian Serbian aggression of 1992-1995. But no atrocity during those years was more iconic of the horror of war, genocide and hatred than the massacre by the Bosnian Serb army of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Hercegovina, in July 1995. Potočari is the final resting place of just over 8,000 (and counting) Bosnians, including those who were killed in Srebrenica. This Sunday we drove from our villages through the green hills of Eastern Bosnia to the memorial site. Potočari's endless neat rows of white gravestones sit among red flowers, green space and the sound of the bubbling of water fountains. Perfect serenity and peace to ease the grief of the families of the dead.

The memorial site and graveyard sit opposite an old battery factory used by the United Nations Dutch battalion, who were drafted in to protect the predominantly Muslim Bosnians against the Bosnian Serb army. Tens of thousands of refugees flocked into this area from neighbouring towns and villages in the thought that they would be safer with international peacekeepers. As it happened, the Bosnian Serb army slaughtered thousands of boys men irrespective of that international presence. Women and girls were sent on buses to areas controlled by the Federation of Bosnia, but not before many of them were raped.

The horror of the massacre still resonates through the survivors of those dark days. A guide at the site lost all the men in her family save one uncle, who now lives in Chicago and suffers from alcoholism. Most of the remains of her grandfather have now been found, this took several years since the graves of the genocide victims were repeatedly disturbed and the bones redistributed to other areas by the Bosnian Serb army in order to minimise any evidence of genocide. The guide's grandfather will be the oldest to be buried on the annual commemoration and burial of the dead, to be held next week, on 11 July. I think he was 78 years old. The youngest to be buried this year was 11 years old at the time of his death. He was born in 1984 - he would have been the same age as me had he not been killed.
Beautiful though it is, Potočari is immersed in grief and sadness. Everyone here is friendly and appears to be happy, but scratch the surface and they all also have a story to tell from the war and its repercussions on their lives, post-conflict: the bones of one person found in five different mass graves; a father, the lone male survivor of a family, who committed suicide by shooting himself in the head; a pregnant women who walked through mile after mile of dense forest in search of safety...

Listening to people, seeing the scores of grave stones, witnessing the digging of the earth to make room for recently found and identified individuals - it can easily eliminate any hope for a bright future in one's heart. In the darkened cinema room of the battery factory, which has been set up to show a documentary about Srebrenica, I could not help but cry when I saw an old woman describe the sweet face of her only son, or when I heard a woman talk of her regret of not trying to save her husband from his bullet ridden fate. I asked myself, would I ever return to the area where all my family had been murdered? Would I testify against a rapist? How could I go on if I were the sole survivor among my family?

A woman on the documentary spoke about her time waiting at the UN "safe area" in Srebrenica, which she described as sheer chaos: people were dying from starvation and exhaustion in one place, moaning from disease and infection in another, and all the while babies would be born out in open, without any medical attention. Life withers and flourishes constantly. It moves and charges forward no matter what the conditions. It waits for no one.
I have spent a lot of my time in my host village trying to understand how these people have learnt to move on, to forget and sometimes forgive. And although I am still struggling with the anger I feel against the perpetrators and my amazement at the inner strength of the Bosnian victims I have come to the conclusion that they go on because, simply put, they must. The only alternative to life is death, and the Bosnian muslims have had more than their fair share of that. Now is the time to live.

By Leila Taheri