SREBRENICA, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA — Across from the abandoned Potocari battery factory, where Muslim residents of this infamously brutalized town were imprisoned in 1995 before women were separated and the men and boys taken away to be killed, a memorial center has risen. A sweeping graveyard and tall white stones mark the final resting place of the remains — many of them only partial — where family members can visit, mourn and remember.

Looking across the lush hillside, Sadik Selimovic, an investigator from the Bosnia Missing Persons Institute, said more mass graves needed to be opened.

“It brings absolute peace to the families,” he said. “I know because I know where my father was killed, who killed him, how he was killed and I know where my brother’s body was found.”

Two brothers and a nephew are still unaccounted for.

Even more than lending peace of mind, this memorial represents a new chapter in Balkan history. As Ratko Mladic, accused as the architect of the massacre of about 8,000 Srebrenica Muslim men and boys, is expected to be sent to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, the terrible process of piecing together the remains of Srebrenica’s dead provides facts, not the myths of which Balkan lore has so long been spun.