Identifying Bosnian War Dead

Revelations this week that a Bosnian Serb officer may know the locations of the graves of more than 1,000 of the Muslims killed at Srebrenica have been welcomed by those hunting mass graves in Bosnia.

Gordon Bacon, chief of staff for the International Commission on Missing Persons, told IWPR of his frustration that someone, somewhere knows the locations of graves, but that people on all three sides in the war - the Bosnian government and the Serb and Croat separatists - are still reluctant to divulge these to former enemies.

"It's like a triangle," he said. "If you have a missing person on one side, the answer lies with someone on one of the other two sides."

Rapid advances in DNA tracing mean that a body, no matter how decomposed, can now almost always be identified - if only investigators know where to look. And this in turn allows relatives to end their long search for missing loved ones.

"The science is now so good we can say with a lot of confidence that if a body is recovered and a blood sample given, we will identify that body," he said.

In previous wars, much cruder methods were all that was available, and once human remains had decomposed, identification was often impossible. "Traditional forensic science was not sufficient to identify," he told IWPR. "There are often no dental records in this part of the world, or the records have gone missing."

Bacon's workers, a mixture of Bosnians and foreigners, carry out work for the country's two missing persons commissions, one for Republika Srpska, the other for the Federation.

Last week, he got a pat on the back from former American president Bill Clinton, who pushed for the agency to be formed in the mid-Nineties. Visiting Srebrenica, Clinton spoke with Bacon about the work of the agency, which now has an eight million US dollar budget funded by 14 nations.

It still has a long way to go - less than half the 30,000 people missing in Bosnia have been accounted for. Although mass graves are being discovered all the time - exhumations are going on now at a grave in Zvornik containing 500 bodies - many remain hidden.

Often investigators have no idea how many bodies they are looking at when confronted by bones, with the flesh long since gone. The fact that that many of the remains were reburied some distance away from their original resting place adds to the problems.

"If we've got a complete body it's easy, but if you go into a secondary grave it's very difficult," said Bacon. "It's a massive jigsaw puzzle, but DNA can solve it."

His agency has collected 48,000 blood samples from relatives of the missing, with mobile laboratories set up around the country trying to match these to DNA from bone fragments.

The vast majority of missing people are Muslims, but Bacon says he is even-handed, "Numbers don't matter, it is individuals."

For the agency, success means the difference between survivors living in permanent uncertainty, or being able to draw some comfort from knowing how a relative met their end.

When Bacon first began work, some people still clung to the hope that missing relatives might be alive, hoping against hope that rumours about secret prison camps were true. One group of Serbs in Kosovo insisted that the agency's volunteers should look for live rather than murdered civilians. "They told me, 'don't talk to us about blood samples. They were here, they are alive.' They thought they were in mobile prison camps," he said.

But as years have passed, such hopes have faded, leaving only a gnawing anxiety to know what has become of a husband, son or father.

While the work is grim, Bacon - a former police detective in Britain - says he gets satisfaction from the effect that identifying a body can have on relatives, "There is a lady in Croatia who told me that finding her son's body and burying him changed her life. It gave her the energy to carry on."

Chris Stephen is IWPR's tribunal project manager.