“TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR LOVED ONES…”

During the Bosnian war 1992-1995, the Bosnian town of Srebrenica at the Bosnian-Serbian border was declared a UN Safe Area in 1993, under the watch of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). In July 1995, General Ratko Mladić and his Serbian paramilitary units overran and captured the town, despite its designation as an area “free from any armed attack or any other hostile act”. In the days following Srebrenica’s fall, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically massacred and buried in mass graves. Thousands of women, children and elderly people were forcibly deported and a large number of women were raped. It was the greatest atrocity on European soil since the Second World War. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that the mass execution of Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica constituted genocide. Judge Fouad Riad, who reviewed the indictment, described the “unimaginable savagery” that the victims endured at the hands of Mladic’s forces. He said these were: “truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history.” In 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote: “Through error, misjudgement and an inability to recognise the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder.” Several months after the Srebrenica massacre, the US Secretary of State released a statement, which alluded to the US being aware of the mass gravesites the Bosnian Serb Army had erected from satellite photos the US had taken. To hide the remains, the Bosnian Serb Army issued an organised effort to dig up primary mass graves using heavy equipment and relocate the evidence of crime. The remains were moved to secondary, sometimes tertiary sites, an act during which the remains became dismembered and mixed with one another. As a direct result of this, multiple DNA tests have become necessary to correctly identify numerous remains of the same victim, scattered in different gravesites. The search for the identities of Srebrenica missing bodies thus became a forensic nightmare – the biggest forensic puzzle ever. “Using DNA to make accurate identifications is vital not only for bringing a sense of closure to relatives of the missing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but it also allows for an accurate accounting of the number of persons who disappeared as a consequence of armed conflict, crimes against humanity and other violations of human rights. It is hoped that this process will make a vital contribution to truth, reconciliation and peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said Ms. Kathryne Bomberger, Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons, an inter-governmental organization tasked with identifying the victims. It is said that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For some women in Bosnia, the stages are on loop. For every time a woman thinks she has buried the remains of her husband or her son, another piece of him resurfaces, and she must re-live the anguish all over again. The following photographs show the painstaking process of DNA-identifying the victims and reassociating their bodies.