In a large pit surrounded by white coded body bags, forensic experts have been toiling away for a month to try to uncover the horrors of what is apparently the largest mass grave of the Bosnian war.
”So far 162 complete skeletons and 46 detached body parts have been found,” Murat Hurtic, a member of the Bosnian Muslim commission for missing people, said on Monday.
”Now we can be sure that it will be the largest mass grave,” in Bosnia, he said referring to the 40m-long grave located in the mountains near the eastern town of Zvornik.
On July 28 experts started exhumation work at the grave located in the area known as Crni Vrh or Black Peak, 80km northeast of Sarajevo, which is believed to contain about 500 bodies of civilians from the region.
Ibro Saric, a Muslim born in nearby Vlasenica who lived in the United Kingdom for the past six decades, recently returned to Bosnia since he believes the grave contains the remains of 17 members of his family, including his sister.
Saric’s family has not been spared the horrors of war during previous conflicts. In World War War II, he lost his father, a brother, three uncles and 20 other family members.
”Even after that war I still did not lose confidence in people. I simply did not believe that they could be so mean. But now this confidence has disappeared for good,” a tearful 87-year-old Saric said.
Three or four people come to the site every day hoping to glean precious information about their loved ones, the Tuzla county attorney said.
”Unfortunately there is nothing for them to see. They can only feel worse,” Hajrudin Mujanovic said at the site.
The Crni Vrh site is a so-called ”secondary” grave where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies from other sites in order to cover up their crimes.
It contains remains that were crushed by bulldozers, which makes DNA identification and even determining the exact number of victims very difficult.
More than a dozen forensic experts in T-shirts and short pants, wearing gloves but no masks, are working at the grave. The odor of decomposing flesh is all-pervasive as the scientists turn over soil and pick through the earth.
Five identification documents have turned up so far showing that victims were Muslim civilians from the eastern towns of Zvornik, Vlasenica and Bratunac, executed when Serb forces captured them at the outbreak of the war.
Most of Zvornik’s 1 500 residents are still missing following the Serbs’ notorious wartime campaign of ethnic cleansing. About 350 bodies have been found in mass graves in the Zvornik area, now in the Serb-run half of Bosnia.
The grave is also believed to contain remains of some of the 7 000 Muslim men and boys summarily executed after Serb forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, in what was Europe’s worst civilian atrocity post-World War II.
Among the remains found, there were those of at least 10 women and three children under 14, Hurtic said, adding that work was expected to end within three weeks.
Almost eight years since the end of the 1992-95 war, which claimed about 200 000 lives, the fate of more than 16 000 missing people is still not known, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Forensic professionals have so far exhumed the remains of more than 17 000 people from 300 mass graves in the country.
The war left Bosnia split into two semi-autonomous halves — the Serb-run Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation. — Sapa-AFP