WAR crimes investigators in the former Yugoslavia are at last making headway in identifying the remains of the thousands who were murdered in ethnic conflicts.
A massive database of DNA collected from relatives of missing persons has dramatically increased the number of positive identifications. Hundreds of families can now be sure what happened to their relatives. “They are looking for the truth,” says Rifat Kesetovic, at the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP), set up in 1996 to investigate war crimes during the Bosnian war.
As many as 40,000 people went missing during the conflict. Most were gunned down and thrown into mass graves, but other bodies were hidden in caves, dumped in septic tanks or left lying in the open. In June 1995, between 7500 and 10,000 Muslims disappeared in the Srebrenica region alone.
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The massacre by Bosnian Serbs was the largest single loss of life in Europe since the Second World War. As front lines shifted, the perpetrators reopened mass graves with mechanical diggers and moved partially decomposed bodies to numerous smaller sites. Secondary graves were sometimes re-excavated and the bodies moved again. These cover-up attempts have left a horrific jumble of bones, partially decomposed tissue, clothes and other personal items. So it has been hard to make progress in identifying the victims.
By 2000 just 74 bodies had been identified. “This was a painfully slow process for the families,” says Edwin Huffine, director of the forensic sciences programme at ICMP. “It was too slow,” adds Adnan Rizvi, the head of ID coordination. “Families were waiting 5 or 10 years, we had to do something. They still have a false hope that someone will knock on the door and say hello.”
In 2000, the commission began collecting DNA from the families. Rather than using it to confirm suspected identities, this time DNA was their first port of call. Every piece of human remains is DNA typed and checked against the database of relatives’ DNA. The huge number of samples collected, 30,000 so far, is unprecedented.
The first breakthrough came on 15 November 2001 when the researchers identified a 15-year-old boy who went missing in 1995. Altogether in 2001, 52 Srebrenica victims were identified. This figure rose to 518 in 2002. This year, 101 people have been named in January alone, Huffine and colleagues told the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Chicago. “Names are being returned to thousands of the missing,” he says.