It never happened: How to deny genocide in the face of science

Scientific advances in DNA identification over the past 15 years have helped war-crimes investigators document to an unprecedented extent the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys around this town in 1995.

Yet even as these technological advances uncovered more damning evidence, many Bosnian Serbs have grown increasingly more resolute in their denial.

Last Friday night, two Bosnian Serb men standing beside a memorial to Serb war dead were a telling example. They insisted that Serbs are the victims of an international plot. They fervently argued — despite 93 mass-grave exhumations and 6,827 DNA identifications of the dead — that the mass killings have been grossly exaggerated.

Biased historical narratives, of course, have existed throughout history. The identification of the dead in Srebrenica demonstrates the ability of technological advances to produce a flood of factual information. Yet in many cases, the scientific statistics appear to have only given those willing to manipulate the numbers more arrows in their quiver.

The two Bosnian Serbs contended that roughly the same number of victims died on each side during the 1992-1995 war. When I asked how such a vast subterfuge had been carried out, one said the answer was simple. “As far as the Muslim side,” he told me, “there is a bigger lobby in America.”

The following morning, interviews with a dozen other Bosnian Serbs living near Srebrenica produced similar answers. As tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims drove past their homes to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the mass killings, Serbs dismissed the gathering and the idea of 8,000 dead as a “farce,” a “circus” and “make believe.”

“It’s definitely not correct,” said Budimir Todorovic, a 60-year-old electrician, as he calmly drank coffee with his family in his front yard as busloads of Bosnian Muslims drove by. “It’s not 8,000.”

Milan Rakic, a 48-year-old store owner, accused Muslims of stealing the bodies of Orthodox Christian Serbs and interring them in the town’s sprawling cemetery complex.

“There are a lot of Serb bodies buried in this memorial,” he said.

One elderly widow said that some Bosnian Muslims listed as dead in the Srebrenica memorial were, in fact, living in Germany. “The number is exaggerated,” she said. “There are many living people whose names are engraved on the gravesites.”

The woman, like the other Serbs interviewed, was genial and polite. The Serbs expressed regret about the war — the woman declared it “horrible, horrible.” But they echoed the arguments of Bosnian Serb nationalists who still dominate politics here. The nationalists contend that foreign powers, primarily the United States and Britain, stage-managed everything from the war itself to the burial of bodies in Srebrenica.

They dismissed the annual commemoration as a “provocation” also organized by meddling outsiders. They said the crowds were so large because “Western NGOs” paid people to attend.

“Everything is well coordinated,” one man standing at the memorial for Serb war dead told me. “No one from here is guilty for what happened.”

Denial is evident outside Bosnia as well. Disparate groups, including left-leaning academics, Russian government-controlled media and some right-wing Americans who talk about a Muslim takeover, scoff at the number of 8,000 dead.

In fact, the annual commemoration and cemetery here have become a global symbol of the international community’s failure to stop the killing in Bosnia. U.N. officials arrived in Srebrenica in 1993 and declared it a United Nations protected “safe area.” When Serb forces attacked it two years later, Dutch peacekeepers and U.N. commanders did little to defend the enclave, and it fell to Serb forces on July 11, 1995. Two weeks of mass expulsions and mass executions followed.

Twenty years later, an estimated 50,000 Bosnians and several thousand foreigners attended the anniversary commemoration last weekend. Dozens of foreign dignitaries did as well, with former President Bill Clinton saying the world must prevent more such killings.

In the largest DNA identification project ever, a nonprofit group called the International Commission on Missing Persons has collected 22,268 blood samples from Srebrenica survivors and matched them to 6,827 bodies.

“Huge advances in DNA identification have made it possible,” said Kathryne Bomberger, director of the project. “The science is moving rapidly.”

Along with 93 mass graves that have been exhumed, investigators have found bodies at 314 “surface sites” in the surrounding mountains. Yet the work is not over. With 8,000 men reported missing from Srebrenica and the nearby town of Zepa, another 1,200 bodies are believed to be scattered in the woods or in mass graves not yet located.

Finding the dead has been vastly complicated by a grisly Bosnian Serb effort to conceal evidence. Several months after the executions, Bosnian Serb forces dug up many of the mass graves and reburied the bodies in dozens of locations. In the process, many corpses were dismembered.

Body parts from single victims have been found at multiple sites. In one case, parts of the body of one victim, 23-year-old Kadrija Music, were discovered in five different mass graves 20 miles apart.

While the DNA identification of the bodies has received widespread praise, the uneven sentencing practices of the U.N.-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has elicited scorn from both Muslims and Serbs.

Bosnian Muslims hailed decisions from the tribunal, as well as the United Nations International Court of Justice, that ruled genocide had occurred in Srebrenica. But they criticized some of the sentences as far too short.

Meanwhile, Serbs insist they have been the victims of the court. They assailed the tribunal for ultimately acquitting Naser Oric, commander of Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica, though they say he is responsible for many deaths

“How many Serbs need to be killed for people in the world to see that Serbs are people, not animals?” asked Rakic, the store owner, who said his uncle was one of Oric’s victims. “Animals have rights but not the Serb people?”

International war-crimes investigators, however, say there is no proportionality in the deaths in Srebrenica or Bosnia as a whole. The say several hundred Serbs died in the fighting around Srebrenica, but the vast majority of them were Serb military forces.

Across the country, Bosnian Muslims made up 65 percent of the war dead and Serbs 23 percent, according to prosecutors. Yet Bosnian Muslims made up 44 percent of the population, according to a census conducted two years before the war. Serbs made up 31 percent.

Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb news accounts lay out a different narrative. They report that 1,300 Serb civilians died around Srebrenica, and a total of 3,267 Serbs were “murdered” across eastern Bosnia.

Dismissing the Bosnian Serbs’ statements as irrelevant conspiracy theories would be easy. But their assertions had an eerie familiarity. In conversations around the world, extremist Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, as well as some on the far right and far left of U.S. politics — have all featured similar arguments.

The stories usually involve a nefarious plot by outsiders to destroy their culture or faith, or future. They say they have had to act in self-defense. As the victims of the plot, they have no choice but to respond.

There is usually some distant, all-powerful covert force — the CIA, the Mossad, oil-rich Arab potentates — deftly stage-managing each event. Local people are helpless victims, with no responsibility for what occurs.

When I asked the Bosnian Serb men about the future of the former Yugoslavia, they said it would be decided in London and Washington. “Basically, how the English and Americans decide,” one told me. “That’s how it will be.”

Though there had been a decade of progress in Bosnia after the 1995 peace accord ended the war, the country has been moving steadily backward over the past 10 years. Bosnian Serb denial of the Srebrenica massacre is growing. Bosnian Muslim resentment of that denial is simmering.

Violence erupted at the 20th anniversary commemoration. Groups of young Bosnian Muslim men hurled stones and slurs at Serbian Prime Minister Alexander Vucic, a wartime ultranationalist now turned pro-Western moderate, forcing him to flee.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, meanwhile, is expanding internationally and applying the DNA identification system it developed to tragedies in other parts of the world. It is identifying the missing in Iraq, Chile and South Africa, as well as victims of typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the passengers shot down in a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine.

Yet scientific and technological advances seem to have changed few views. One new conspiracy theory circulated by Serb nationalists is that the remains recently buried in the Srebrenica memorial are Filipinos who died in typhoon Haiyan.

Friday 17 July 2015

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/07/17/it-never-happened-how-to-deny-genocide-in-the-face-of-science/

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Why we are excavating the dead of Srebrenica

On Saturday, world attention will focus for a few hours on the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. The systematic killing that took place 20 years ago constitutes the only recognised genocide on European soil since the second world war.

Weeks after the killings, the perpetrators returned, excavated the mass graves with mechanical diggers and transported bodies and body parts to secondary graves in an attempt to disperse and conceal evidence of the crime. This was an enormous undertaking considering that almost 8,000 people had been executed.

For nearly two decades, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), of which I am director general, has worked with families of the missing, local Bosnian authorities and domestic and international courts to locate and identify the victims of Srebrenica. This has made it possible for families to bury their dead with dignity, and it has made it possible to piece together what happened and to prosecute some of those who were responsible for the murders.

On Saturday, at a ceremony that will be attended by world leaders as well as tens of thousands of mourners, more than 100 newly identified bodies will be laid to rest in the cemetery at Potocari, near Srebrenica.

The killers’ attempt to hide evidence by scattering body parts made the usual identification process using articles of clothing, distinguishing physical features and identity documents almost impossible. In 1999, ICMP made the decision to harness a new technology, DNA, to identify the victims. Many observers were sceptical about the efficacy of what was then an untried approach – but it turned out to be astonishingly successful: the number of identifications increased exponentially. Today, almost 7,000 of the 8,000 missing from Srebrenica have been identified using DNA.

Beyond Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as other countries in the region of the western Balkans, including Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, more than 40,000 persons went missing during the brutal conflicts between 1991 and 2001. Today, more than 70% of those persons have been accounted for.

However, accounting for the missing has also involved establishing why they went missing and who was responsible, and it entails upholding the rights of survivors.

The vast majority of the missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina were male, which means that women became single heads of their households and had to deal with often hostile and usually male-dominated authorities when trying to assert their rights to justice and social and economic benefits.

Those who killed in Srebrenica in July 1995 believed they could get away with murder. They thought they could erase the identity of their victims permanently. They were wrong.

The work of ICMP, in particular the scientific evidence of the identity of victims from the conflicts of the 90s, has made it possible to piece together an incontestable narrative of crimes, and to present this evidence in numerous trials, including those of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.

While this is something that gives substance to the familiar cry of “Never again,” it will be up to the countries in the western Balkans, and in particular Bosnia and Herzegovina, to engage in an honest reckoning with the past, rather than narratives based on chauvinism or denial.



At the end of last year, the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, Belgium and Luxembourg signed a treaty establishing ICMP as an international organisation in its own right, and by the end of this year we will move our headquarters from Sarajevo to The Hague, where we intend to play a key role in implementing what is emerging as a new global consensus on missing persons – whether the cause is armed conflict or migration or crime or natural disaster.

Once, when I was visiting a woman whose son had been missing for more than a decade, my host took a small blue tin of skin cream and opened it carefully. She pointed to the indentation on the smooth white surface of the ointment. It was her son’s fingerprint, the only physical memorial of his presence on this Earth.

There are no ways of quantifying human love, but there are tangible and useful ways of dismantling the legacy of hate. Accounting for the missing and safeguarding the rights of survivors, including the rights to truth and justice, is among those ways.

Friday 10 July 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/09/srebrenica-20-years-on

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Srebrenica women tell tale of loss through objects of memory

Twenty years ago Saturday, Bosnian Serb troops led by Gen. Ratko Mladic carried out Europe's worst carnage since the end of World War II - a massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys that a United Nations court calls a genocide. As Dutch peacekeepers stood helplessly by, the Serbs stormed the Srebrenica safe haven, separating men and boys from women. They drove the males away in trucks and massacred 2,000 on the spot. About 15,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys fled into the woods; the Serbs hunted 6,000 of them down and killed them one by one - some 8,000 in all. The bodies were dumped in mass graves that were bulldozed to hide the evidence, causing remains to be jumbled up into a jigsaw puzzle that has yet to be fully solved. About 1,000 victims remain to be found. Many families have reburied a few bones identified as belonging to their loved-ones through DNA testing.

Two decades later, Srebrenica's women still grieve. Here are some of their stories told through cherished objects.

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HUSBAND'S SHIRT

Fazila Efendic, 64, keeps her husband Hamed's old terracotta-color shirt in the closet. He was 46 when the Bosnian Serb troops shot him dead in the forest. "When I miss him, I open the closet, touch the shirt and I can't say if I feel better or worse then," she says. "But I must touch it." It's the same thing with the school diplomas of her only son Fejzo, who was 20 when he was killed in the Srebrenica massacre. "He won several regional competitions in math and physics. He was a very good child." She showed a white handkerchief with blue stripes that her son gave her before Srebrenica fell. "I carry it around wherever I go," she said. She found the remains of both men years ago and buried them at the Srebrenica Memorial Center, where they lay with nearly 7,000 other victims. She found Hamed in 2003 in one mass grave and Fejzo - or rather two of his leg bones - in 2013 in another.

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HANDFUL OF CLAY

Meva Hodzic takes out a tobacco box, a rusted Swiss knife and a key from a plastic box, and with them fall crumbs of clay. She puts the clay back in the bag, because it's a kind of relic, too: It comes from the mass grave where her husband was found after Serbs killed him in the forest, as he fled carrying the three objects. "It belongs to these items and they should stay together. I was asked to give all this up for a museum of items found in mass graves. But, no," she says "how can I do that if it's the only thing I have left from him?" Mujo ran into the forest with the other Srebrenica men after promising to come back to find her in the purported safe haven that was under Dutch peacekeeper protection. Instead, parts of Mujo's body turned up after the war in three different mass graves. He was put together and identified through DNA analysis. "Besides him I lost two brothers, my father, two sons-in-law and my nephews."

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PICTURE OF SORROW

When Remzija Delic, 58, wakes up in the morning, the first thing she sees on the wall is the picture of her husband Sabit. Then she gets up and looks through the window at the former factory that the United Nations turned into their military headquarters after they declared Srebrenica a safe haven - staring hard at its gate. She goes to the stove and puts the water on boil for her morning coffee. When she returns to the window, she sees her neighbor walking down the street to work, and her face grows dark. She says he was the Bosnian Serb army soldier who separated her husband from her at the factory gate, selecting him to become one of the victims of the massacre. She also lost her father, two brothers and several nephews. As Sabit was trying to board the bus transporting the Srebrenica women to government-held territory, she says, the neighbor grabbed him by the back and yelled: "No. Not you." He pushed him over to the crowd of men chosen for killing, according to Delic. Forensic experts found Sabit, 40, in a mass grave. "You know, all this did not make me hate the Serbs," she says. "There are some wonderful people among them."

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TOBACCO BOX AND FLINT

Djulka Jusupovic, 65, carefully handles a tobacco box made of cans of U.N.-delivered food, along with a piece of flint used to make fire with during the war. After three years of Serb siege, the population ran out of lighters or matches and improvised just like cavemen did. "Someone would make fire with this in his garden in the morning, then everybody would come with a piece of wood to light it and take it home to make a fire," she said, describing life in a town that was on the brink of starvation before the bloodletting began. She keeps the items in several plastic bags. They are still as dirty as they were found when found on her husband, Himzo, as he was excavated from a mass grave. These days she rarely looks at the objects. Each time she takes them out, she remembers what the forensic experts told her when they handed them to her: Himzo, after being shot, may have still been alive when buried.

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HOME-KNIT SWEATER

"Once this sweater was white like snow," says 60-year-old Kadira Gabeljic. "I knitted it myself." She points to it in a picture of the clothes wrapped around her husband's skeleton when forensic experts found him. "Now it's black from the dirt of the mass grave they found him in, and it is torn in the middle from bullets that rattled through his stomach when the Serbs shot him." Her only two children, sons Mesud, 16, and Meho, 21, followed their father Abdulah and the other men fleeing through the woods. All three were hunted down and slaughtered. Her 42-year-old husband and Meho were taken to a warehouse in the nearby village of Kravice and locked inside with another 1,000 other men who were hunted down. Then the Serbs threw hand grenades inside and mowed down the crowd through the windows, until they killed all of them. Forensic experts later found their body parts in four different mass graves. "Actually, they only found parts of Meho," she said. "The head and legs. The middle part is still missing. I buried what I had."

Thursday 9 July 2015

http://www.ksby.com/story/29507535/srebrenica-women-tell-tale-of-loss-through-objects-of-memory

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Funerals of 136 Bosnian victims to mark anniversary

This year’s 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre will be marked by the burial of 136 victims identified over the past year, an official said on Friday.

The Institute for Missing Persons said 160 corpses from the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries had been identified since last year’s July 11 anniversary.

The youngest is a 16-year-old boy of mixed Muslim-Serb parentage whose body was recovered from a secondary mass grave. The remains of 17 other under-18s have been identified.

“We have formally identified 136 victims, whose families have declared that they want the remains to be buried on July 11 this year... the identified persons are ready for the collective funeral on July 11," institute spokeswoman Lejla Cengic told Anadolu Agency.

They will be interred at Potocari memorial center.

The families of 24 victims are waiting to bury their loved ones as not all their remains have been found.

In the summer of 1995 Srebrenica was overrun by troops led by Ratko Mladic, currently on trial at The Hague for ordering the killings. Dutch UN peacekeepers watched on as Serb troops herded men and boys from the town to be murdered.

Since the end of the war, hundreds of Bosniak families have searched for missing relatives, most of who were buried in mass graves around the country.

A total of 6,166 Srebrenica victims have been buried at Potocari and a further 230 are buried outside the town.

Friday 3 July 2015

http://www.worldbulletin.net/world/161690/funerals-of-136-bosnian-victims-to-mark-anniversary

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Srebrenica survivor brings solace in quest for human bones

Day after day, Ramiz Nukic goes into the woods around Srebrenica in search of a tragic quarry: human bones.

There's rarely a day in which he does not find the remains of at least one murdered boy or man, even 20 years after Europe's worst massacre since World War II. Srebrenica's killing fields swallowed up 8,000 bodies, and the murderers took pains to hide evidence of the genocide.

Nukic's quest started in 1999 after he returned to his empty hometown of Kamenice and began looking for the remains of his murdered father and younger brother. As the family's only male massacre survivor, he became obsessed with bringing closure to their loss. Every day he discovered bones that gave other families the gift of mourning, but not his own. Every day he kept trying, and quietly he built up an astonishing record: Nukic's discoveries have allowed Bosnia's Institute for Missing Persons to identify nearly 300 Srebrenica victims.

But his father and brother eluded him.

Srebrenica was a Muslim town besieged by Serb forces in Bosnia's 1992-95 ethnic war, in which Serbs tried to wrest away territory from Bosnian Muslims and Croats to form their own state. Serb troops led by Gen. Ratko Mladic — on trial in The Hague on genocide charges — overran the enclave in July 1995 and some 15,000 Srebrenica men fled into the mountains.

The rest of the population, some 25,000 people, sought protection from Dutch U.N. peacekeepers stationed at the suburb of Potocari. But the outnumbered Blue Helmets could only watch as Serb troops occupied their base and separated men and boys from women, and loaded the males on buses and trucks. They slaughtered some 2,000 men and boys straightaway on July 11, 1995. Then they hunted down and killed 6,000 more who fled into the forests.

Over 7,000 bodies of victims have been found in 93 mass graves and 314 surface sites throughout northeastern Bosnia. Another 1,000 people are still missing.

As the massacre unfolded, Nukic said goodbye to his wife and children in front of the U.N. base, and disappeared into the woods with his father and brother, joining other fleeing Srebrenica men.

But the Serbs set ambushes along their path. As the Bosnian Muslim men sat down to rest on a hill just above Nukic's village, Serb guns and tanks suddenly fired on the group. About a thousand were killed on the spot — including Nukic's father and brother. Nukic survived because he hid in the fern until the shooting was over. Knowing the terrain, he managed to sneak away and eventually find his wife and children in a refugee camp.

Nukic returned to his empty village of Kamenice in 1999 and gathered courage to climb up the hill where his loved ones died. The sight that greeted him froze his blood.

"When I saw those clothes and shoes scattered around the site," he said, "I went numb."

Right at his feet, he found three complete skeletons.

From then on, Nukic searched the woods every day, overturning branches and leaves, hoping to find his father and brother. But there was no way to tell who he found.

"A bone is a bone," he said. "You do not know who it belongs to."

Each time he discovered bones he contacted the Institute for Missing Persons, which took away the remains to identify through DNA analysis.

"I rarely return home empty-handed," he said as he sat on a tree stump next to his latest finding. He is not allowed to touch the bones. It's a crime scene.

"I feel bad when I don't find a bone," said Nukic, a farmer. "I'm happy when I do. Because one family will find closure."

Calmly lighting a cigarette, he pulled out his mobile phone and called his contact at the institute.

After extensive descriptions of his location, institute representative Sadik Selimovic turned up to make the collection.

"Ramiz Nukic's help has no price," Selimovic said. "Thanks to him many bones got their names. I do not know how the institute could repay him. We have run out of words of gratitude for him."

This year, Nukic's dream of finding his father and brother came true, but he wasn't the one who made the discovery: The incomplete remains were found in a mass grave.

He will bury his father on July 11. "It feels good, although he is not complete. I will bury him, and I will know where his grave is," Nukic said.

But his mission is not over. Nukic intends to keep hunting for bones to the end of his life.

Friday 3 July 2015

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article26214601.html

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Bosnia to bury hundreds more Srebrenica victims

The bodies will be buried on July 11, the anniversary of the mass killings in 1995, at the Potocari Memorial in eastern Bosnia which commemorates those who died.

Four hundred and sixty-one victims' bodies are currently being kept at the Podrinje Identification Centre in Tuzla, and the head of the centre, Rifat Kesetovic, said that so far, 188 families have agreed to bury their family members on the anniversary.

“It is still early to give estimates concerning the number of burials that will take place on July 11, but we assume that between 300 and 500 killed Srebrenica residents will be buried,” said Kesetovic.

“Identifications are conducted continuously, without a break. We can assume that more victims will have been identified by July,” he said.

A total of 6,194 people who were killed at Srebrenica have been identified in Tuzla so far, and 5,657 of them have been buried in Potocari.

“The number of people who have been identified at the Podrinje Identification Centre is close to 7,000,” Kesetovic said.

Alongside the identification process, the re-exhumation of incomplete bodies is being carried out, Kesetovic explained, because other parts of those bodies have been discovered since their burials.

About 200 re-exhumations have already been conducted, while several hundred are still pending, he added.

More than 7,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were killed in the days following the capture of the enclave by the Bosnian Serb army on July 11, 1995.

Several verdicts from the Hague Tribunal, the Bosnian State court and the International Court of Justice have ruled that the killings constituted genocide.

Tuesday 2 April 2013

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/up-to-500-victims-to-be-buried-in-potocari

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Nermin Sarajlic: Hunt for Missing Gets Harder Each Year

Nermin Sarajlic, a forensic pathologist and head of the Forensic Department of the Medical Faculty in Sarajevo - who has worked for the International Commission for Missing Persons, ICMP, in Bosnia for years - says the search missing persons is becoming harder as time elapses.

According to the ICMP figures, around 30,000 people were missing, presumably dead, at the end of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. To date, two thirds of those have been found and identified. Around 10,000 people are still missing.

“A few years after the war we discovered a mass grave with the remains of a wife, mother and two sons,” Sarajlic recalls.

“They were killed near their home but the man managed to escape. He came back the following day and buried them near the house.”

“We came with him and looked for this grave all day. We barely managed to find it. I use this example to show how difficult it can be to find a grave, even when you have all the facts to hand, so imagine what it’s like today, when there are fewer witnesses and the terrain has changed,” Sarajlic told BIRN.

As a forensic pathologist, Sarajlic is the first on the scene when a mass grave is found. He says many problems slow down the identification of remains, ranging from the type of grave to issues of staffing.

If the mass grave is of a secondary or tertiary type, which means that the bodies have been moved from one grave to another, the remains will be mixed up, Sarajlic says. This makes the exhumation difficult, but it is also makes the forensic work and the task of identifying the victims hard as well.

“I am aware that this process seems long and too long to some, but it’s quite common to assemble a single body after conducting as many as eight DNA tests on body parts found in different graves - up to four graves in some cases, where bodies have been moved,” he explains.

Sarajlic says that there are cases when it is impossible to isolate the DNA, for instance when the remains have been burnt.

Another issue slowing the search for missing persons, Sarajlic says, is a combination of poor data about the locations of mass graves and lack of expert forensic pathologists.

“The conditions we work in are poor. The media only cover exhumations, and what comes later, in terms of the identifying and piecing the bodies back together, just isn’t covered. There are only 12 or 13 forensic pathologists in the whole of Bosnia and only seven or eight are working on these issues,” he says.

“It’s not only overall numbers, it’s that we all have other work to do. There is not a single forensic pathologist who is solely dedicated to the work of exhuming and identifying missing persons,” Sarajlic notes.

He blames the Bosnian authorities for not recognizing the need to form centres for forensic pathology.

“I feel that the state has not shown interest. From the very start, the existing forensic departments within medical faculties should have been upgraded. There was an opportunity when the Institute for Missing Persons was formed, to create a forensic division within it, but it wasn’t done. That is why we have such a small number of experts today,” he believes.

Although his job entails engaging with horrific scenes of graves and remains, Sarajlic derives deep satisfaction from the belief that he is helping victims and their families.

“All I can say is that I am trying to do my best,” he says.

“The way I see it, if I do my job well – identifying victims, piecing together bodies – then I am helping people and victims in the only way that they can still be helped. I am trying to focus on getting the job done, but it is never easy,” Sarajlic concludes.

Wednesday 27 October 2012

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/nermin-sarajlic-hunt-for-missing-gets-harder-each-year/btj-topic-missing-persons-latest-headlines/3

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Witness Details Srebrenica Mass Graves Study

Former investigator describes complexities of identifying human remains from various sites.

The trial of former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic continued this week with testimony from a former prosecution investigator about the research done on mass graves dating from the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995.

Karadzic is accused of planning and overseeing the murder of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995. The indictments against him include genocide, extermination, murder, persecutions and other crimes against humanity and war crimes.

A high percentage of the Srebrenica victims have been identified from the remains found in mass graves.

This week’s witness, Dusan Janc, is a police inspector in Slovenia. As he told the court this week, between 2006 and 2009, he served as an investigator the Hague tribunal’s Office of the Prosecutor, studying mass graves and the Srebrenica victims they contained.

The witness described his role as being to prepare reports about the investigation and identification process, including a document he drafted for the Karadzic trial. These reports were based on data collected by “a team of international experts working in the field in eastern Bosnia”.

Janc explained that his latest report had been updated in certain areas, “including a more current representation of the number of victims found so far”.

He said specified during the main examination that the International Commission on Missing Persons, which provided the basic data for his reports, had identified 5,977 of the Srebrenica victims as of the end of 2011. A further 260 sets of remains had been located “without their identity having been determined”, he said. This, he added, was because there was no comparable DNA material available from family members.

“Another difficulty was obviously the fact that many people had a very similar DNA structure, including brothers or even twins, which made it difficult for the identification,” he continued.

The witness said his latest report, completed in January, included “new data about previously unknown locations for mass graves, and had also more broadly considered the issue of mortal remains found on the surface”.

In his testimony, Janc explained the concept of “primary” and “secondary” mass graves – the latter being sites “where the bodies were taken from locations they were originally buried at, in order to cover up the crime”.

As an example of relocation, he said that “in an extreme case, one man’s remains were found in three mass graves, whereas five body parts of the same person were found in two mass graves”, located far apart from each other.

Janc noted that a peculiar feature of some locations of killings was that similar numbers of victims were found to have died.

“There were three sites in the broader Srebrenica region at which slightly over 800 people were killed, he said, citing a figure of 815 bodies at Kozluk, for example.

“This proves that somehow the number 800 was a ‘threshold’,” he said. “Perhaps it was the transport capacity of the VRS [Bosnian Serb Army], or a temporary accommodation capacity.”

During cross-examination, Karadzic asked the witness whether his task was “to support the prosecution”. The witness answered in the affirmative, but rejected the assertion that this meant he was biased.

Karadzic suggested that the witness simply accepted data from reports by international experts without “checking what was being written and who was writing them”.

The witness replied that he had acquired sufficient evidence from many different and objective researchers to be able to draw valid conclusions, without having to look into “points of research made by individuals”.

Janc said he was “ready to discuss concrete measures or mistakes if the defendant wished to ask any questions”.

Karadzic said he would not be doing so, due to lack of time.

He went on to put it to the witness that “victims also came from different time periods, months or maybe years before”.

Janc replied that there was a “complex set of criteria used to connect them to the events in July 1995, including the way of death, the locations, or the objects found with the victims in the mass graves”.

“There was only one mass grave, at Biljeceva, in which the remains of the Srebrenica victims were mixed up with older remains,” he added.

Karadzic continued the same line of questioning, referring to Baljkovice – an area the witness mentioned in his report. He argued that this was the scene of intense combat between Bosnian Serb forces and the Bosnian government army, as a result of which “a very large number – hundreds – of Muslim soldiers were killed”.

The bodies of these combat victims, Karadzic said, were “properly picked up during the clearing up of the terrain, buried in mass graves”, and therefore could not be regarded as victims of the July 1995 events in Srebrenica. “In fact, the clearing up was properly ordered on July 20, 1995,” he added.

The witness answered that experts had not found “any mass grave with hundreds of bodies in that area”.

“While a few mass graves were found in that area, [there were] small ones which obviously did have a few fighting-related remains [but] none of these were included in my report,” Janc explained, adding the caveat that “there may be further mass graves which were as yet unfound” and that “any effort on supporting the discovery of additional mass graves would be welcome”.

“Regarding the clearing up, I wish to repeat that the evidence we have – aerial photography, but also testimonies from different involved people – confirm the contrary; that there was no clearing up of the terrain, but that the mass graves were rather hastily and unsystematically dug,” he concluded.

The trial continues next week.

30 March 2012

http://iwpr.net/report-news/witness-details-srebrenica-mass-graves-study

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Srebrenica: Three More Bodies Found

The Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons recovered the remains of three war victims from a mass grave near the village of Suceska, in Srebrenica municipality.

According to information from the Institute for Missing Persons, the remains are probably those of men killed in July 1995 in Srebrenica.

The remains were transported to the Commemorative Center in Tuzla for analysis and identification.

On the same day, the remains of another victim were found near Sanski Most in northwestern Bosnia.

The Bosnian state prosecution, which has national responsibility for exhumations, said that the remains would be sent to the Sejkovaca mortuary for identification.

Representatives of the Institute for Missing Persons and police officers from both Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina participated in the exhumations in Srebrenica and Sanski Most.

According to available information, at the end of the conflict in Bosnia an estimated 30,000 people were reported as missing. The remains of two thirds have been found, and around 10,000 people are still missing from the Bosnian conflict.

Thu 22 March 2012

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/remains-of-war-victims-recovered

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