30 years after Srebrenica: "There are families who have buried their dead with only a piece of femur."

Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina)"Two perfectly symmetrical bones—that's how we know they belonged to the same individual." Dr. Dragana Vucetic, a forensic anthropologist with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), has been helping to identify the remains of people murdered in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War for twenty years. In what has been deemed the first genocide in Europe since World War II, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered. Thirty years later, more than 7,000 bodies have been identified and returned to their families, who have provided burial. However, for Vucetic, every bone is important so that families can come to terms with the trauma and find peace. This Friday, seven people will be buried at the Potocari memorial in Srebrenica, where the genocide is commemorated with a grand ceremony every July 11.

She fits the bones together carefully and precisely, like a puzzle. Her job is to determine if the remains she receives from the excavations are from the same person, what their profile was, and how they died. After her work, the remains are sent to the laboratory and compared with samples from relatives in the registry. If the entire procedure goes well and they find a match, her colleagues will make the call that nearly 8,000 Bosnian families have been waiting for for more than 30 years: it will mean that they have found their relative and can now bury them.

Sometimes, they find just a bone, and the family must then decide whether to bury it or wait. This could be the case she's working on now, which is one of the most difficult: two very small fragments of a femur that were recently discovered thanks to a neighbor's testimony. "We're looking for a man who died from a grenade explosion during the war," she says. "If we can extract DNA and see that it matches the family's, it means someone moved the body from where he died."

More than 8,000 victims

When war broke out in 1992, the country's three main communities—Catholic Bosnian Croats, Orthodox Bosnian Serbs, and Muslim Bosniaks—began a struggle for control of the territory, attempting to expel the other communities from the areas where they were the majority. Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave surrounded by territory controlled by Serbian forces, was gradually encircled until the trapped and increasingly vulnerable population sought refuge in the UN base on the outskirts of the city, which had been declared a "safe area" by the United Nations. But on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb troops, under the command of General Ratko Mladić, occupied the base. They separated more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys from the women and shot them, while the Dutch peacekeepers, who had pledged to protect them, did nothing to stop them.

Most of the dead were buried in mass graves, from where they are still being exhumed. The skeleton in front of him, Vucetic has pieced together from remains found in four different mass graves. However, it is missing its entire left leg and part of its right foot. "That's typical," he says. After the Srebrenica massacre, the perpetrators again excavated and scattered the bodies, deliberately trying to hide the crime and make identification of the victims difficult. "Some families have buried their dead with only a piece of a femur," he adds.

The Tuzla identification center, where the ICMP team handles cases from the Srebrenica region, is built in a prefabricated container, as if to indicate the temporary nature of the facility's initial intention. But although it seems stuck—like so many other things in this country—the project is moving forward thanks to the conviction of professionals and international funding. "Nobody knows when it will end," Vucetic admits, but maintains that he would like to "see it through to the end."

At the institute, there are 200 "active cases" spread across a climate-controlled room lined with shelves. Each "active case" is an incomplete story: a bag containing skeletal remains and personal belongings that have not yet been officially identified. Some are awaiting DNA analysis results; others are just fragments that the family has been unable or unwilling to bury. There is also a third category, the NN or no name, in English, who are those who cannot find any match in the family registry. These cases are decreasing, but there are still 89 at the Tuzla Forensic Institute.

Misidentifications

Until 2001, the identification process was carried out without DNA analysis, so there were some errors. Families identified their relatives based on clothing or other personal belongings. "Very little happened here, but in the cases that did, we now have to tell them that the person they buried was not their relative and that they must be exhumed. It's very difficult to tell this to a family that buried their relative 30 years ago."

Although she doesn't have much contact with the families, and that's fine with her, Vucetic considers it her "duty" to work for them. "Without burying the dead, it's very difficult to find peace," she says. And despite the increase in denial and the wear and tear of time, she is convinced that one day they will find the 1,000 people still buried in mass graves near Srebrenica.

The end of their work is the beginning of the judicial and criminal prosecution of the guilty parties, which allows the families to heal another open wound. The identification of the bones and injuries allows for the issuance of a death certificate and verification that a crime has occurred, so that the courts can then try the criminals and deliver justice. "The important thing is to help families bring closure and survive the trauma. The guilty parties ending up in prison is the way to complete the process," says this anthropologist. "You can't imagine how grateful the families are even if we only find a single bone."