They are the unquiet dead. Laid out in rows across the interior space of a former industrial building on the edge of the Bosnian town of Sanski Most, the remains of human beings, in various degrees of integration. Some of the skeletons are almost complete, others just a pelvic bone and some assorted ribs, arranged as though to await the arrival of more, towards the whole. The eye-sockets of their skulls seem almost to tell the violent story of execution with a terrible silence; all sound in this space is dulled, muted, by a pale light cast through high windows. There\u2019s a single bullet hole through the crown of each one.<\/p>\n
This place was used to process wood before Bosnia\u2019s war of the early 1990s, and now it processes \u2013 it endeavours to assemble \u2013 the dead. The remains are laid out on raised trays, and at the foot of each lie possessions and clothing found with the body when it was exhumed, invariably from a mass grave. So to walk through this hall of death is also to walk through these people\u2019s lives and last moments. A pair of trainers here, a checked shirt there, a watch or wallet. What made this person choose a yellow sweater rather than another on a market rail, and chance to be wearing it when taken out to be murdered? Why striped socks beneath this half-assembly of bones, plain ones to accompany the next? Who were these people? That is the question.<\/p>\n
Because in addition to the spectral presence in this building, run by the Krajina Identification Project, there is diligent purpose. These dead people had been missing for 24 years, along with tens of thousands of others, while their families \u2013 survivors of the hurricane of violence that blew through this corner of Europe in 1992 \u2013 searched, wondered, feared the worst. Now they have been found \u2013 but who are they?<\/p>\n
This facility is one in a chain that seeks to answer that question, the work of which is the most remarkable entwinement of science, human rights and justice in the world today. The task of that chain is to locate and exhume the 40,000 people who went missing after the western Balkan wars \u2013 the worst carnage to blight Europe since the Third Reich \u2013 then to assemble their remains insofar as they can be found, identify them, give them names, and return these dead back to the living for burial. It is scientific work at its most committed and advanced, helping to meet humankind\u2019s most primal need: to bury or in some way ritualise the remains of our dead.<\/p>\n
Beside a rough road that climbs a remote mountainside, between the towns of Prijedor and Sanski Most, lies the house that Zijad Ba\u010di\u0107 has rebuilt in the hamlet of \u010carakovo, from the ashes to which it was charred in 1992, and where he now plays football with his son, Adin. Beside it a modest marble monument has been raised, on which are carved the names of 38 people, many of them members of Zijad\u2019s extended family. Some of them were killed on the night of 25 July 1992; others vanished. Zijad was 15 years old on the night that \u2013 after his father and most other men had been taken away to concentration camps \u2013 Serbian death squads came back to \u201cmop up\u201d the women and children. He recalls it vividly:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were at home when we heard the soldiers\u2019 voices. \u2018Come on out! Come on out!\u2019 My mother gestured to us: we must. As soon as they went out, and the other families around us, machine guns began firing. I recognised one of the men, the others wore balaclavas. They were about five years older than me. I watched my mother hit first and fall down, then my brother and sister \u2013 and I ran behind a bush to hide. I stayed there until they had finished shooting and shouting \u2013 I recognised another of the balaclava men from his voice; they came from just down in the valley, they were neighbours. I saw their arms shooting pistols at those who were still living, until they stopped screaming.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe killers went, and slowly I emerged. I saw two other children, a boy of 10, a girl of 13. We looked at each other as though we were ghosts. We were the only ones of 32 in the hamlet to survive. I saw a man sitting on that bench there \u2013 he looked as though he was asleep, but he was shot dead. I saw my mother \u2013 \u0160ida, she was born in 1946 \u2013 and my brother Sabahudin and sister Zikreta dead in the garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I survived. I can still hear their voices, the shooting. I was deported on the convoys, and went to a refugee camp in Germany. And I never thought I\u2019d come back here, but I couldn\u2019t sleep without knowing\u2026 what happened? Where were they? I had to find my missing father, all my uncles, and to find where they had buried my mother, younger brother and sister.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is mid-afternoon, the rain of morning banished by a breeze from the west, and sunlight strokes the beauty of the hillside. Blue and yellow summer flowers are scattered across the meadows. Adin swings his scooter around. \u201cI reported everything I knew. I gave blood [to help investigators find DNA matches], and started digging where I thought they might be,\u201d says Zijad. \u201cA Serbian lady came: \u2018Why are you digging here?\u2019 I said I\u2019m looking for my family. She said: \u2018They\u2019re not here. Try somewhere else.\u2019 I believe that 99 per cent of the people here know exactly where they are. Only they don\u2019t care to tell me, or they\u2019re too afraid of the people who did it. But I need to know where. I need funerals. I need trials.\u201d<\/p>\n
There have been seven arrests in connection with the extermination of the \u010carakovo villagers. Two of the accused have been released on bail under house arrest, and Zijad thinks they are the men he recognised on the night of the massacre. \u201cThat\u2019s one of their houses right there,\u201d he says, pointing towards a white building on the valley floor. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping that these trials will reveal where my family is. I\u2019m going to testify. Even though we\u2019re surrounded by them, I have no fear of anyone or anything any more. All I have is my wife and son, and my only need in life \u2013 which is to find those I have lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where Zijad\u2019s mountain lane meets a tarmac byway, there stands a little shop kept by Zijad\u2019s uncle, Fikret Ba\u010di\u0107, who takes my notebook and writes a list of the names of his extended family who went missing during the last week of July 1992. It takes him a long time; there are 29 of them, including his mother Sehri\u0161a, his wife Ninka, son Nermin, who was 12, daughter Nermina, who was six, four brothers including Zijad\u2019s father, three sisters, several aunts, uncles and cousins. Of the 29, 19 are children; the youngest was two.<\/p>\n
Fikret\u2019s eyes are the saddest imaginable, as unfathomable as his loss is inconsolable. \u201cThey were taken and killed by the viaduct, just there, by the main road,\u201d he points to a railway bridge beneath which we\u2019d just driven. \u201cFor years, I\u2019ve had no idea where they were buried.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was working in Germany when it happened; of course I couldn\u2019t believe it.\u201d The first thing Fikret did was to tour refugee camps across Europe: Holland, France, Austria, Croatia. \u201cI hardly knew what I was doing, like a wild hunter-dog. But nothing. So there was only one thing to do: come back, and I never thought I\u2019d do that, back to the destroyed house. But I did, in 1998, only to start looking, for I had nothing else to do with my life but find the bodies and the people who did this. I asked a Serb, who had been the best man at my wedding, raised by my grandmother: where are they? There are not many people I can ask, I pleaded with him, I just need to know who did this, and where they are buried. He just said: \u2018I don\u2019t know, I was not there.\u2019 I could tell he was lying. I went to the police in Prijedor, but everyone knew it had been the police who organised the hiding of the bodies. Two men knew \u2013 I had a feeling. I went to the house of one, but he had guests and would not talk. Then the other, but he had died. Then I realised the only thing to do was to start digging.<\/p>\n
\u201cI dug everywhere. I helped wherever there was a dig.\u201d Fikret went to the mass grave found at the village of Kevljani in 1999, next to a concentration camp established by the Bosnian Serbs at Omarska; it had been found when villagers spotted strange vegetation growing in his field, of a kind the soil beneath it would not normally nurture. There was no sign of Fikret\u2019s family.<\/p>\n
Then, in 2004, work began at a second mass grave, also near Omarska, at Toma\u0161ica.\u00a0Fikret was there, digging, but the bodies found there still did not include his family. \u201cNone of us knew,\u201d he says, that \u201cwe were only 100 metres from the biggest mass grave of them all.\u201d<\/p>\n
We sit in Fikret\u2019s yard, beside the shop, roses climbing the fence, neighbours passing by, saluting him. He sips a glass of Nektar beer, a Bosnian Serb brew. \u201cThe pain doesn\u2019t go away, it gets worse, stronger, the longer it lasts,\u201d he says. \u201cI went to the state court, and an American prosecutor showed an interest for a while, but then said he had to leave and take another job. After a while, I gave up, I couldn\u2019t go on any more.\u201d Then, in 2013, there was a bigger, macabre discovery at Toma\u0161ica: hundreds more bodies, buried, hidden \u2013 but now revealed. Fikret Ba\u010di\u0107 was there moments after the first earth was broken and news sent abroad.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever I could go, I was there. It seemed that they had buried them village by village, in order of where they\u2019d been killed along the road from Prijedor. Go deeper, go deeper, we all said. We had all given blood by now, and first, they started to find my neighbours, the Tatarevi\u0107 brothers, up the lane there. Then a cousin of mine. And then my brother Refik \u2013 no documents, but the DNA matched.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to say what I felt. It was like someone who belongs to me coming back from ten metres deep. He\u2019s my family. And then another body comes out, and it\u2019s not one of mine, and you feel so bad. I did that for three months, until the last body was found and either identified or not. Now we must wait for another grave to contain the women and children: two were found at Toma\u0161ica, but still 17 kids are missing, aged two to 16. You know, I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m saying this; it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and in this lovely evening, for me to have to tell you that all this is true, that this is what people do to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
The driving force behind this search for the missing dead in the blood-drenched Balkans is the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), founded in 1996 on the basis of an initiative by President Bill Clinton at a G7 summit in Lyon, France. ICMP arrived to urge the location and identification of 30,000 people in Bosnia (and 10,000 more across the region), \u2018missing\u2019 in mass graves. Over two decades, this it has done, both physically and scientifically, spearheading a battle against what appeared to be all odds. Most have been found and their remains returned to their families \u2013 but 8,000 in Bosnia are still missing.<\/p>\n
The scope of what ICMP has been doing here in Bosnia since its foundation is almost beyond comprehension. Originally a non-governmental organisation, it was recently given full international legal status, covered by treaty. So now, from these benches holding their skeletons in Bosnia\u2019s rural reaches, ICMP takes on the world. This work addresses the existentially offensive limbo suffered by tens of millions of families around the planet \u2013 the state of not knowing, not having so much as the remains of a child, husband, wife or parent, to do what humans have always done: bury them.<\/p>\n
Already the object of ICMP\u2019s attention have been the site of the World Trade Center in New York, advising on how to identify those killed on 9\/11; Guatemala and El Salvador, searching for the missing from US-led \u201cdirty wars\u201d of the 1980s; and South-east Asia, identifying victims of the tsunami in 2004. The organisation, says its director-general, Kathryne Bomberger, is thinking about future work that might include searching for the victims of not only conflict but natural disaster, enforced disappearance, human trafficking \u2013 and migration. Detailed country programmes are devised for Iraq, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Albania and Ukraine. It is even preparing to address the as yet unquantifiable missing of the Syrian conflict \u2013 and the 10,000 missing children from the migration crisis in Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do this from a premise that all missing persons have rights, the same rights,\u201d says Bomberger. \u201cBut in addition to the humanitarian principles, this is also about the rule of law \u2013 it is an obligation of states under international law to find missing persons.\u201d<\/p>\n
The money this work will require is minuscule in comparison to corporate or even aid budgets \u2013 and yet, \u201cthis is an increasingly mean world when it comes to funding,\u201d says Bomberger, and the missing are easily overlooked. \u201cWe need a strong capacity for the sake of rich and poor countries alike; ours is an appeal to the self-interest of governments, as well as their better nature,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s of benefit to the world, to find its missing people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe world out there is one big NN mass grave,\u201d says Ian Hanson, the man who broke the very first ground here in Bosnia in search of the 8,100 victims of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. \u201cNN\u201d is the abbreviation used on graves; it stands for \u201cNo Name\u201d.<\/p>\n
So this is now a global project. But it all began here, in the earth beneath the plains of Croatia, and amid the mountains and rivers of Bosnia.<\/p>\n
Over the summer of 1991, the break-up of Yugoslavia began to turn bloody, first in Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia, as Yugoslav republics sought independence and Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s government in Belgrade sought to establish borders for a \u201cGreater Serbia\u201d, which spread into both Croatia and Bosnia and entailed the elimination, through death or deportation, of every non-Serb on the territory.<\/p>\n
In Bosnia, a savage pogrom was unleashed in spring 1992, mainly at first against Slavic Muslims in the east and against Bosniak Muslims and Catholic Croats in the north-west Krajina; the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo was subjected to relentless siege and the stillborn republic torn apart.<\/p>\n
It was my accursed honour to report on this war, and in August 1992 to uncover concentration camps, established by the Serbs for Muslim and Croat inmates, near the town of Prijedor in Krajina. The carnage dragged on until soon after the Srebrenica massacre three bloody years later.<\/p>\n
I have kept in touch with the survivors of, and those bereaved by, those camps, and come to understand how the outrage of \u201cdisappearance\u201d inflicts an immeasurable pain on those who remain. I return to Bosnia every year for commemorations at the camp, and hear how, in so many ways, those words \u201cMissing\u201d and \u201cDisappeared\u201d are crueller than \u201cDead\u201d; they leave the mothers, fathers and family without so much as an interment, a grave to visit, an account of what happened and why.<\/p>\n
By the time Bosnia\u2019s war ended, in 1995, the discipline of forensic anthropology in pursuit of the missing had been advanced significantly: in theory by an American called Clyde Snow, and in practice by a bold and radical group, the Argentinian Forensic Anthropology Team, established in 1986 to trace and identify the thousands forcibly \u201cdisappeared\u201d during that country\u2019s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. \u201cFor the first time in the history of human rights investigations,\u201d wrote Snow, \u201cwe began to use a scientific method to investigate violations. Although we started out small, it led to a genuine revolution in how human rights violations are investigated.\u201d The scale of the catastrophe in Bosnia meant that the search needed to draw on that revolution, to which ICMP would in time add a second revolution: the introduction of DNA matching.<\/p>\n
When investigators from the war crimes tribunal in the Hague first arrived in 1996 to build a case against the perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre, their first preposterous task was to search for the evidence: its victims, 8,100 murdered men and boys ploughed into the ground.<\/p>\n
They were led by a French investigator called Jean-Ren\u00e9 Ruez, an anthropologist called Richard Wright, who had worked on World War II graves in Ukraine, and a former archaeologist of ancient and medieval London, Ian Hanson \u2013 who is now deputy director of forensic sciences, anthropology and archaeology at ICMP.<\/p>\n
The modern discipline of finding and identifying the hidden dead, Hanson says, has its roots in World War II: a famous case was the identification of 27,000 Polish officers massacred at Katy\u0144 in spring 1940. The USSR insisted they had been killed by the Germans, but a German investigation disproved this, forensically demonstrating that they had been murdered by the Russian political police, NKVD. \u201cFor once,\u201d concedes Hanson, \u201cI\u2019m afraid the Nazis were right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Work at Srebrenica began on what were thought to be the five mass burial sites \u2013 each containing many separate graves \u2013 in which the dead had been buried and left hidden. Then a macabre truth emerged: testing showed that body parts from what became called the primary graves had been moved to secondary ones, to hide evidence. Sometimes, they had even been disinterred and reinterred again, into tertiary graves. With two implications: firstly, that more than a million and a half bones and body parts from 8,100 people were scattered across innumerable sites; and secondly, that the few byways of rural eastern Bosnia had for weeks, months, been heaving with trucks carrying the rotting, stinking remains of these people \u2013 some 3.2 tonnes of \u201cputrefactive material\u201d \u2013 hither and thither. Yet no one said a thing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe call this \u2018grave-robbing\u2019,\u201d says Hanson. Enquiries by him and others found that the Serbs had arranged secondary graves \u201cto be located in places where there had been armed confrontations, so that they could plead that massacre victims were killed in combat. It was all very carefully worked out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The search for the missing was initially regarded as a humanitarian affair. But the war crimes tribunal\u2019s motivation was prosecutorial. When ICMP arrived in 1996, it dovetailed into that notion, so that its approach was altogether new, and tougher: finding the hidden dead for human reasons, but also seeking evidence to establish what happened and uphold the rule of law. The victims clearly approve: of the relatives of the missing who gave blood samples in pursuit of a DNA match, 90 per cent agreed to allow any results to be used in evidence at trial.<\/p>\n
From the outset, the process of finding and identifying the dead was hampered by a toxic atmosphere of denial, non-cooperation and sectarian structures that dealt with their own side\u2019s losses and no one else\u2019s \u2013 markedly among the main perpetrators responsible for more than 80 per cent of the missing, the Bosnian Serbs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we first arrived,\u201d says Hanson, who was then with the war crimes tribunal, \u201cthe people with the information we needed were not nice guys; they were guys with guns not wanting us to do what we had come to do. We used to go into the police stations that were supposed to be helping us, and see pictures of ourselves on the wall: \u2018Do Not Cooperate with These People\u2019!\u201d<\/p>\n
To that end, ICMP stepped in, not just to help look for bodies and nurture the expertise to do so, but to \u201cassist\u201d the Bosnian government in turning a haphazard, sectarian search into a systematised, centralised operation. Hanson uses the word \u201cassist\u201d but moves his flattened palms against thin air making as if to push it.<\/p>\n
The initial search focused mainly on Srebrenica. Identification both there and in Krajina was at first done using classical anthropological methods: identifying possessions, dental treatment, clothing etc. But from 2000, ICMP began using DNA samples from blood given by relatives of the dead, matching them with those gleaned meticulously from samples of excavated bone. This was the second revolution in forensic anthropology and the figures speak for themselves: in 1997, seven positive identifications; in 2001, 52; in 2004, 522.<\/p>\n
Srebrenica has become iconic of Bosnia\u2019s carnage, yet it tends to detract from other atrocities over the three years of the war. Bosnia is a country without a reckoning, a call to account. And nowhere is this more brutal than in Krajina, with the second biggest concentration of mass graves, the first of which was found in 1999 at Kevljani. Near what had been the iron ore mine of Omarska, it contained 143 bodies of men murdered in the camp.<\/p>\n
A second grave was found at Kevljani, this one with 456 victims of camp Omarska, and others around a mining facility at Ljubija. But only in 2013 did Bosnia\u2019s single largest mass grave away from Srebrenica come to light, a few kilometres away down a dirt track from Omarska, by which time the site of the camp had been re-opened as a mine: the grave at Toma\u0161ica in which Fikret Ba\u010di\u0107 found his brother. The site looks like a pond now, water settled in the sunken earth, from which reeds grow. A family from the nearby Serbian village walk up the track towards it, carrying fishing rods. But for more than a year, this was a scene unlike almost any other in Bosnia since the war.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey arrived here, all of them,\u201d recalls Dijana Sarzinski, mortuary manager at the Krajina Identification Project (KIP) facility on the edge of Sanski Most. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to exhume bodies from a grave of 11 people, as many of them are. But here were 434, possibly more.\u201d The figure would later rise to nearly 600. \u201cThey had been preserved in clay for 20 years, tightly packed together, glued by decaying tissue.\u201d Here was the KIP\u2019s extreme exposure to a science called taphonomy \u2013 that of the decomposition of organisms, known by the initials FBAAD: fresh, bloat, active, advanced, dry. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit different when you see people staring at you from the earth: their eyelashes, lips, fingerprints. You get used to the smell of bodies, but not like they were at Toma\u0161ica. We all had PTSD after Toma\u0161ica.\u201d<\/p>\n
Working on the Toma\u0161ica inventory at Krajina was Victoria-Amina Dautovi\u0107, who in September 1992 had been the first baby born to Bosnian refugee parents in the UK \u2013 her father Enver survived Omarska and her mother Kelima carried her in utero<\/em> while held in Trnopolje. Victoria-Amina studied forensic science at West London University specifically so as to be able to return and look for her friends\u2019 parents and parents\u2019 friends. After the discovery of Toma\u0161ica, ICMP offered her an internship. \u201cOn the first day, I couldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d she says. \u201cI knew the names of these people coming across the desk, and I knew the families crying in the next room, when their relatives had been identified. They were from Kozarac, where we spend every summer, our neighbours. I cried, I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d be able to cope. Then I told myself: this is what you have to do, this is the job \u2013 and I managed.\u201d<\/p>\n Investigators at Toma\u0161ica found a terrible echo of the grave-robbing that they had discovered at the other end of the country: evidence of matching body parts in different graves. The practice of disinterring and reinterring bodies, by now so perturbingly familiar from work around Srebrenica, had actually begun here three years earlier than it had there.<\/p>\n One of the human agonies of this separation of body parts is that some people are identified on the basis of just a few bones, and it is up to the families to decide whether they have enough to bury or whether to wait for more.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople find their missing, but not complete,\u201d says Amor Ma\u0161ovic, who set up the Muslim-Croat Federation Missing Persons Commission after the war. \u201cThey don\u2019t know if they have peace or not. They may bury a few fingers and a leg, and five years later there\u2019s a knock at the door, it\u2019s the left leg now, two years later a piece of skull. It\u2019s part of that awful limbo.\u201d At one point, Islamic spiritual authorities decreed it irreligious to bury less than 40 per cent of a body, further exacerbating the trauma for those believers trying to deal with fragments.<\/p>\n \u201cDuring the siege of Sarajevo,\u201d recalls Ma\u0161ovic, the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladi\u0107 \u201ctold his gunners: \u2018drive them to the edge of madness\u2019. Well, this was the same principle, but for the madness to remain after the war. The madness of relatives of the missing, which will remain until their own deaths. They appear as statistics, all 40,000 of them. But each number is a horror story that people are going through, every one of them like a novel you could read for the rest of your life.\u201d<\/p>\n There are organisations that form a bridge between the mechanisms of search and the families of the missing. Mirsad Duratovi\u0107, a survivor of Omarska, is president of the Association of Camp Detainees of Prijedor 1992. He is also, as he puts it, \u201ca messenger of death\u201d to families he knows well, with news of mainly men he knew from Omarska, where prisoners would be called each night from their crammed quarters for routine torture, rape, mutilation and death.<\/p>\n After Toma\u0161ica, Mirsad says, \u201ceveryone was asking the same thing: is it my husband, is it my son? And I\u2019ve had every kind of encounter. I ring the bell, and for 20 seconds we embrace, because no words are necessary. They already know what news I bring. You can\u2019t explain or describe the feelings, nor would I wish them on anyone else. In a strange way, it\u2019s the best kind of feeling, and the worst, at once.\u201d<\/p>\n We talk at the site of the Toma\u0161ica mass grave after yet another day of commemoration at Omarska, women laying flowers at the now-locked doors of rooms where they were kept, hardened men cracking up at the reliving of cruel memory. \u201cThe question of the missing is what made me come back,\u201d says Mirsad. He had been living in Germany until 1999. \u201cI had myself lost 47 members of my extended family.\u201d<\/p>\n Mirsad is elegant. He wears pressed shirts and occasionally a suit, which is rare around here. His hair is groomed, he drinks little. He sits as an independent on a local authority dominated by a party which alternately justifies and denies the \u201cGreater Serbia\u201d pogrom. This is one of the weirdnesses of postwar politics in Bosnia: are they crazy, or just pretending to be?<\/p>\n When Mirsad talks about \u201cthe feelings\u201d, he speaks from experience. \u201cThe hardest of all,\u201d he says, \u201cwas to knock on my own mother\u2019s door, and tell her that her own husband, my father, and her other two sons, my brothers, had been found. On one hand, it was the news we had all been waiting for; on the other, it is the beginning of a different grief. My mother always said that when her husband and my brothers were found, things will be easier. The pain of the wait was killing her, it had been so long. Now we have buried them, and we can at last start to go through the bereavement. That day I had to be both a messenger and a son.\u201d<\/p>\n For Mirsad, there is a wider purpose in this work: \u201cto prove that there was genocide in an area where there has been no conviction for genocide\u201d. The war crimes tribunal in the Hague has ruled in serial cases that genocide was committed at Srebrenica and adjacent Zepa, but not yet anywhere else in Bosnia. \u201cTo prove systematic killings and prove systematic hiding of bodies. Systematic and premeditated. It wasn\u2019t enough to kill all these people and their families and children, burn their towns and villages, blow up their mosques and Catholic churches, burn their files and papers and history, take the men to concentration camps and either kill or deport them, so these people never existed \u2013 and then<\/em> to systematically hide their dead. If that is not genocide, I don\u2019t know what is.\u201d<\/p>\n The bodies from Toma\u0161ica, like those from all around Krajina, come first to that facility on the edge of Sanski Most. Forensic anthropologist Dijana Sarzinski\u2019s role here is testimony to Bosnia\u2019s global leadership in this expertise: from Sarajevo, she studied at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and then at the University of Central Lancashire in England, before coming home to join ICMP as an intern.<\/p>\n The standard operating practice here is the world\u2019s \u201cgold standard,\u201d says Sarzinski. Remains are meticulously washed, and a biological profile established. Scientists and technicians work in silence, clad in blue tunics and masks, washing body matter, cleaning bones with toothbrushes. The bones are subject to a physical decontamination, followed by removal of any exogenous DNA that may have attached itself. A small sample of bone \u2013 a \u201cbone window\u201d \u2013 is then extracted with precision blades, to be passed on to the laboratories. \u201cWe\u2019re not allowed, as anthropologists, to determine a cause of death \u2013 that\u2019s for the pathologists,\u201d says Sarzinski. \u201cBut we can prepare the cases and point out possible causes.\u201d The single bullet holes through the skulls of these men from Hozica Kamen are articulate enough.<\/p>\n The numbers arriving from Toma\u0161ica were so overwhelming that the bodies \u201chad to be treated with salt, basically mummified, using a method thousands of years old, preferred by the ancient Egyptians,\u201d she says. \u201cThey had been preserved in clay for so long, and very quickly decompose \u2013 through desiccation of tissue, bugs and maggots.\u201d<\/p>\n The bodies from Hrastova Glavica, a desolate mountain hamlet near Sanski Most, presented a different challenge. In August 1992, the Serbs brought 125 prisoners here by bus from the camps at Kereterm and Omarkska. They took them off the buses bound in groups of three, gave each man a cigarette, shot them and slotted them individually down a crevice in the rocks. (The grave was found because one man broke free and survived to tell the tale.) \u201cBody parts had been squashed together for so long, they were all co-mingled, tissue stuck together, tissue and bone from one body all mixed up with another,\u201d Sarzinski says.<\/p>\n Once the bones are ready, they have to be re-associated with others from the same skeleton; this is crucial to establish what grave-robbing has taken place. \u201cIt became very quickly clear that of the 434 bodies we received from Toma\u0161ica, 56 cases of body parts needed re-associating with cases which had been previously identified at Jakorina Kosa,\u201d says Sarzinski. But others enter into the category of NN, no name.<\/p>\n ICMP started an NN Project in 2013, explains Sarzinski, \u201cto give names to associated skeletons that had none\u201d. The project is \u201call-encompassing,\u201d she says. \u201cIt throws together everything we have and can get, from the police, the families, the prosecutor\u2019s office, seeking out new areas of investigation and pushing for them, trying to fit any and every tiny part in a huge jigsaw puzzle.\u201d<\/p>\n I ask whether Sarzinski would like to come to this year\u2019s commemoration at Omarska \u2013 put faces to the bones, as it were. \u201cI can\u2019t,\u201d she replies. \u201cI have to do this job for what it is. I can\u2019t afford to cross that line.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the reasons that so many of the dead in Toma\u0161ica have been identified is that many relatives from around Prijedor had given blood samples. ICMP\u2019s revolutionary DNA-matching process proceeds from Sanski Most and the other mortuaries to the organisation\u2019s core, in Sarajevo. The kernel of this entire operation is the DNA lab, a small, unprepossessing room on the first floor of a modern office block.<\/p>\n Ana Bili\u0107 is deputy head of ICMP\u2019s laboratories division. Like Sarzinski, she is young, and testimony to this singularly strange speciality Bosnia\u2019s tribulation has produced: born in Sarajevo, she trained at the university here before completing a Master\u2019s at Halifax, Canada, and returned to do this work. There is a logic to Bosnia\u2019s becoming a world leader in this grisly expertise, in addition to the experience of war: medical science was practised in communist Yugoslavia to a markedly high standard, and science now serves as some kind of absolute that transgresses the bitter divide of war, and might even transcend it. The Sarajevo facility is the hub of a network of laboratories in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia \u2013 politically balanced.<\/p>\n It takes three weeks for DNA-matching to take place. On one side of the process, there are the reference samples of blood from relatives of the dead, collected during exhaustive drives in Bosnia and among the scattered, shattered diaspora across Europe and America. Bili\u0107 shows me one of the so-called IsoCode cards on which blood arrives from the relatives: six drops from the right index finger, air-locked in a plastic bag. The blood is valid for DNA testing for 20 years, explains Bili\u0107. The DNA in the blood is then bar-coded, given a digital existence that may or may not help it find its match.<\/p>\n On the other side are the bone samples from places like Sanski Most. The scoured bone windows are \u201cground into a fine powder, to increase the surface available for testing,\u201d says Bili\u0107, and 0.5\u20131 g of the bone powder is, like the blood, bar-coded inside a small plastic bag. Bili\u0107 produces one: \u201cSome of these people have been dead a long time, stacked up in clay, rivers and canyons, and it\u2019s a challenge to extract the DNA.\u201d She shows a chart demonstrating that some bones are easier than others \u2013 teeth, vertebrae and talus bones (in the ankle) are best, she says, for extraction of osteocytes, a variety of cell in which DNA is more likely to be preserved.<\/p>\n The method of DNA identification preferred by ICMP, explains Bili\u0107, is nuclear short tandem repeat. It concerns the number of times a nucleotide is repeated consecutively on the DNA strand. She says that this method has a \u201chigher discriminatory power\u201d than any other, \u201cand a certainty threshold of 99.95 per cent, sometimes higher, often 99.999 recurring. As close to certain as it is possible to get.\u201d<\/p>\n And into the computer they go: bar codes from the bone, and those from the blood samples \u2013 sorted by a specially devised \u201cblind\u201d programme \u2013 blind, not least, to political rhetoric, manipulation, denial. Cold, clean science to enact, says Bili\u0107, \u201cblind searches of kinship analysis, so that the possible identification of the person can be made. Without the use of DNA, there would be no way to put these parts of the puzzle together again.\u201d<\/p>\n The system\u2019s near-perfection produces many matches, but also leads to a new set of problems: the discovery of mis-identifications using earlier, less accurate methods. As Amor Ma\u0161ovic explains: \u201cAbout 8,000 were identified through classical methods, of which some are completely wrong \u2013 they have two left legs, they are part one person, part another.<\/p>\n \u201cWith DNA testing, some families realise the person they buried 15 years ago was a mistake. They will know that their son has been identified, but is in a mortuary in Sanski Most, or Banja Luka, not in the ground. And this agony begins: of disinterring the misidentified body, and replacing it with the correct remains.\u201d But the Muslim-Croat Federation Missing Persons Commission has a policy, Ma\u0161ovic says: \u201cWe will not disturb people in the ground \u2013 because it only disturbs the families \u2013 unless we have found another body to replace it. We can correct a mistake, but we can\u2019t take a body from a family if there is none to replace it.\u201d<\/p>\n Down the corridor from Bili\u0107\u2019s lab, Ian Hanson\u2019s depth of commitment allows him no respite; he almost corrodes himself with his own questions. \u201cWhen I moved here from the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in the Hague] in 2009, we\u2019d found 70 per cent of the missing. Why are we not finding more? Why are there are still 8,000 people missing? There are reasons for that.\u201d<\/p>\n The cruellest, most effective, impediment to their work is the rule of silence \u2013 observed when body parts were being moved along lanes near Srebrenica and Omarska, and observed still. \u201cOne of the constant issues we face,\u201d says Hanson, \u201cis that someone knows where the graves are, but everyone gets on with their business. People know, without giving us the information. It\u2019s an issue among the Serbs in Krajina, the Bosniaks in Sarajevo, the Croats in Mostar. They\u2019re reluctant to come forward, or scared of intimidation.\u201d<\/p>\n A series of US government cables from 2008 \u2013 posted by WikiLeaks \u2013 show how much the Serb administration, Republika Srpska, has impeded efforts to find the missing. One says that \u201cauthorities have taken a series of steps to undermine the ability of the state-level Missing Persons Institute (MPI) to locate, exhume and identity victims\u201d. A further cable says that a separate Serb-only missing persons agency has taken \u201cincreasingly bold steps to undermine\u201d the central, non-sectarian MPI. This Serb agency is empowered to \u201cwithhold information from MPI,\u201d the cable says, and has even engaged in \u201cconfiscation of MPI material\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is the incentive for people to help us when the risk is so high?\u201d asks Hanson. \u201cThey all keep quiet, not even wanting to implicate the others, in case they implicate themselves. But they all want an outcome. We can go into a room full of people who do not want to work with each other \u2013 but they all know that we are the ones who do the DNA tests that lead to bodies being found. So the question to them all is: do you want these people found or not?\u201d<\/p>\n Hava Tatarevi\u0107\u2019s garden is ablaze with the palette of summer. Scarlet begonias, white marguerite daisies with yellow suns at their core, deep pink climbing roses \u2013 and smoky blue forget-me-nots, for that Mrs Tatarevi\u0107 could never do, whether before her husband and six sons were found, or after.<\/p>\n She is the older sister of Zijad Ba\u010di\u0107\u2019s murdered mother, and she survived \u2013 \u201cif you can call this survival,\u201d she says \u2013 to tell the story of the night she lost her family, some weeks before the murder of Zijad\u2019s. \u201cIt was one of the first days of the war. Men came to the house, and took them all away. They took my husband, Murharem. And six of my sons: Senad, Sead, Nihad, Zijad, Nidzad and Zilhad. All apart from my youngest, Semir. They said he was too young. They came to the house with guns, and balaclavas, and just said: \u2018You\u2019re coming with us, if not we\u2019ll kill you all, here and now.\u2019 I started to cry, and they said: \u2018Don\u2019t worry old lady, they\u2019ll be back.\u2019 And marched them down the hill.<\/p>\n \u201cI never saw my sons again, but a few days after that, the same men came back and ravaged everything. They stole what they wanted from the house, ate and drank what was here, and smashed the rest. They killed all our animals. They said there was a restaurant down on the road by the viaduct, where I was supposed to go. But they said: \u2018Don\u2019t go there, it\u2019ll upset you. It\u2019s full of children hungry and crying\u2019 \u2013 I think many of them were killed. So I was taken instead to the camp at Trnopolje, then on the convoys to Travnik. From there, after a long time, my sister came and took me to Croatia, and then Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n Mrs Tatarevi\u0107 pauses. The only sounds audible are bees across the flowerbeds and the hum of a tractor in mid-distance. She offers coffee, but it seems too much trouble. \u201cI started looking for them all right away,\u201d she continues after a while. \u201cFirst of all I looked around the refugee camps. I wrote letters. People would come to Germany from all over the diaspora, and I\u2019d ask them: have you seen my children? Have you seen my husband? I started coming back in summer to rebuild the house, and plant things. And I asked everyone, even the Serbian neighbours: have you seen them? Do you know where they are?<\/p>\n \u201cI went to the police in Sanski Most to register them. I gave my blood sample to the people from Sarajevo. I went to Trnopolje where the concentration camp had been, and asked people there. I don\u2019t know how I survived the pain. I don\u2019t know if I did<\/em> survive the pain. I just wanted to know \u2013 how did they die? Are they still alive? Might they come back to the village while I am in Germany? If they were dead, all I wanted to do was to hold their bones in my hands, and find a place of green grass under which to bury them, and say my prayers and say: there they are, my dead sons.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, after almost a quarter-century of this purgatory, she learned about the new mass grave found in 2013. \u201cI think I knew, I had a sense, something told me this was it. We went to Bosnia on the Sunday, to the grave site, to Toma\u0161ica. There was a grave full of children and young people from our village. And there was one of my sons, Senad, still with his wedding ring on. And I knew, even before they took the others to the laboratory, a voice told me it was them, the other five. And yes, later, a woman came: \u2018We have your husband, we have your sons,\u2019 she said.\u201d<\/p>\n Dusk falls across the heat haze. The sound of the evening muezzin drifts across the valley \u2013 once intended never to be heard here again. Insects buzz across the flowerbeds as the cool of evening descends. The brutal bedlam of those days and nights 24 years ago seems unimaginable, but Mrs Tatarevi\u0107\u2019s gracious presence, and falling tear, make it only too cruelly real. \u201cIt is hard enough to lose a child, I think. But to lose them all? What can I say? What can I do? I cannot jump out of my skin into another. I just have to do what I can with my own. And they are buried now. The wait is over.\u201d<\/p>\n