Srebrenica, Bosnia (CNSNews.com) - Former President Bill Clinton was excoriated by prominent Republicans and peace groups alike for not intervening early enough in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, yet survivors of one of the war's most horrific massacres picked him to open a memorial to the victims.

"We think it's good, I think it's good," said Munira Hirkic, a Muslim woman in her 60s whose husband disappeared after a U.N.-declared "safe area" in Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serb army in July 1995. Around 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in the massacre.

"He's a good man -- he prepared food packages for us, and we were so hungry," Hirkic said, thankful for the wartime humanitarian aid the Clinton administration had authorized.

Hirkic's sentiments are common among Bosnian Muslims, though many also wonder why Clinton didn't act until after the massacre.

"(Srebrenica) enabled me to secure NATO support for the bombing that led to the peace that put Bosnia-Herzegovina back on the long road to a normal life," Clinton said at the opening of the memorial Saturday.

About 15,000 people, mostly women, gathered to bury 107 victims of the massacre at the site. NATO bombings later in 1995 brought the warring parties to the negotiating table in Dayton, Ohio, ending a war that killed 200,000 and created 2 million refugees.

"Those most responsible for the atrocities - the leaders - have not been apprehended," Clinton said, referring to Bosnian Serb wartime military leader Ratko Mladic and political leader Radovan Karadzic, both of whom have been on the run for eight years since the U.N. war crimes tribunal indicted them for genocide after Srebrenica.

"The search for them must continue until they are. We owe it to the men and boys buried in this hallowed ground; we owe it to the wives and children who survived them," he said.

War criminals aside, Bosnia's most pressing problem is unemployment: The one million refugees who have returned home since the end of the war can't find work. Only about 2,000 Muslims have returned to the Srebrenica area, where factories stand in ruins.

"There's not much work here," Hirkic said. There are few men with the women who've returned to Srebrenica in the past two years.

"Now there are a lot of us, and we have each other, and OK, it's nice to be back in your own house, but it'll never be as nice as it was -- my husband is gone, my son is gone, the male neighbors are gone. It's rare, rare for anyone to have (a man in the house)," she said.

The men have so far been found in hundreds of mass graves scattered throughout the country. No one knows how many more remain to be found. But finding these so-called "secondary graves" - in which military officials secretly reburied bodies after moving them from the original sites - depends on witnesses or anonymous tips.

"There certainly hasn't been a drying up of that information," said Gordon Bacon, chief of staff of the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP). The organization runs the largest DNA identification project in the world, matching bone samples from mass graves to blood samples given by living relatives.

"Without information on gravesites, all the money in the world and all the blood samples collected can't identify remains," he said.

Since 2001, the ICMP has identified 1,083 Srebrenica victims. But other relatives of the thousands more killed here eight years ago can only wait for a phone call.

"I gave blood, but I haven't heard anything," Hirkic said.

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