DNA the Latest Weapon in Bosnia War Aftermath

Like a kid with a jigsaw puzzle, Nancy Fichter arranges fetid bones on a table until they form a male teenager. Finding no identifying clues, she sighs and puts him back into a numbered mesh sack.

Another 4,150 puzzles wait in the cold room behind her, each jumbled into muddy white bags with separate sacks for rotted clothing. All were shot by Serbs at Srebrenica, in the best known but hardly the only Bosnian atrocity.

Five years after the war ended, 25,000 to 30,000 people are missing, most of them still hidden in graves under mounds of garbage, in the rubble of mosques or in mine-studded fields. About 90% are Muslims.

Anthropologists like 29-year-old Fichter, from Michigan State University, peer hopefully for healed childhood bone breaks or deformities a mother might recognize. So long after the fact, they mostly peer in vain.

“It is frustrating, and when there are decayed bits of flesh to cut away it can be disgusting,” Fichter said. A stench that defies description underscores her point. “But it is important.”

A deal struck in Dayton, Ohio, on Nov. 21, 1995, silenced the guns. Today Bosnia is hard enough for the living, with lingering hatreds and economic depression in a land that suffered 200,000 deaths in three years. For many, the dead are a secondary priority. But survivors need answers to rebuild their lives.

“Counting family members and close friends, maybe a quarter-million people desperately await news,” said Gordon Bacon, a former homicide detective from Britain who heads the missing persons project in Bosnia. “That is an awful lot of misery and sadness.”

The year after the Dayton accord, leaders of the Group of Eight nations set up the International Commission for Missing Persons. Now, headed by former U.S. Sen. Robert J. Dole and run by Bacon, the commission struggles to operate on a budget of about $5 million a year.

“We know we can’t help everyone,” said Bacon, a burly, graying veteran in the field of humanitarian aid. “But if we can just get the financial resources, we can relieve a great deal of this pain and uncertainty.”

The United States has given $10 million over four years. The Dutch, whose troops were based at Srebrenica when it fell, have paid about $4 million. Britain has donated only an initial check for $15,000.

“We are trying to raise more,” Bacon said. “There is nothing at all from the Middle East, although for Muslims a proper burial is almost a sacrament.”

So far, specialists have relied on conventional means to identify bodies: recovered documents and personal items; skeletal peculiarities; an occasional match from rare dental records.

Fichter and her husband, Robert Ashford, work in Tuzla trying to trace nearly 8,000 Muslims killed in Srebrenica in 1995. So far, only 109 of them have been identified.

Elsewhere, Eva Klonowski, a Polish-born anthropologist from Iceland, helps Bosnian specialists find scattered mass graves and identify remains.

When family members provide a name, DNA tests are used when possible for confirmation. Only 70% of what scientists call “presumptive identifications” by relatives are found to be accurate.

But now the ICMP is shifting its emphasis to wide-scale DNA sampling. With state-of-the-art laboratories in Bosnia, the cost will be cut by two-thirds to $300 per case.

This will speed up the process substantially. It will also require extra funding. For a complete DNA database, field teams must collect 75,000 blood samples from close relatives in Bosnia and abroad.

“At this stage, DNA is the only hope for many of these cases,” Klonowski said, standing amid a different sort of puzzle board she had laid out at Visoko, near Sarajevo.

Seventy-three zippered white body bags lay on a concrete floor under a tin roof, each topped with ragged clothing, shoe fragments and items from pockets. Families browsed among them, like customers at a macabre flea market.

One hefty woman in a scarf stopped at bag No. PK15B, her eye caught by the remnants of her son’s sneakers. She snatched up one shoe and clutched it to her breast. Then she collapsed in sobs until an ambulance came to take her away.

Moments later, PK18B, lying nearby, also had a name, thanks to the last shreds of a familiar leather belt. If DNA confirms these two, they will bring to 45 the identifications from the 73 bodies Klonowski found in August at Visegrad and Rogatica.

Although buried for eight years, many of those bodies could be identified quickly because the circumstances of their disappearance remained fresh in their families’ memories.

Serbs herded Muslims from Visegrad into a bus, supposedly heading to a camp. The men were taken to a forest and executed, one by one. A lone survivor escaped, running through the trees in a hail of bullets. He fell and was presumed dead.

The man walked for two days, his hands tied behind his back, until a sympathetic villager found him and nursed him to health. When the war ended, he took investigators to the massacre site.

“We weren’t sure where it was, but we kept looking,” Klonowski said. “For 11 days, 10 hours a day, we threw aside heavy stones until we uncovered the cave where they were hidden. With compassion, you can move mountains.”

Brenda Kennedy, a Canadian who heads the identification team, describes the work as grueling, disheartening and often thankless, but also as the most rewarding job she has ever had.

She estimates that, altogether, more than 3,000 bodies have been identified since 1995, for the most part Muslims. An additional 2,000 to 3,000 are exhumed each year.

Investigators face not only technical problems but also the bitter politics left by war. Most victims are Muslims, and few Serbs or Croats have shown eagerness to help locate them.

Separately from the ICMP identification process, forensic pathologists with the Hague war crimes prosecutors’ office have been exhuming mass graves to find evidence of massacre. They have priority at any suspected crime scene.

The Hague investigators seldom spend time on seeking identity, concentrating instead on cause and manner of death. Once they are finished, they deliver body bags and personal effects to local officials, who call in Bacon’s team.

Though reluctant to criticize, ICMP anthropologists say their work would have gone much faster had the two agencies cooperated on autopsies. Sometimes, they say, crucial documents are seized but not recorded. Papers go astray.

“I find it very strange as a former policeman that the Hague are not bothered by identification,” Bacon said. “That is usually all-important to prosecution.”

Graham Blewitt, an Australian deputy prosecutor at the Hague tribunal, said his pathologists try to establish identity but will settle for just physical evidence of executions because the scope of the war was so great. Although his investigators seek to cooperate with missing persons experts as much as possible, their priority is to work quickly and keep crime scenes intact, he said. “Once we make a determination about a site, we would object to anyone interfering,” he said.

In the future, both men agree, the two groups will coordinate more closely. Prosecutors are moving up the chain of command, concentrating less on evidence in mass graves. Most often, the ICMP will exhume graves with a Hague observer.

Although the Hague tribunal hears cases from throughout former Yugoslavia, Blewitt said his 100 investigators spend two-thirds of their time on Bosnia. He said lengthy exhumations strained limited resources and delayed indictments.

Bosnian authorities say both organizations are essential. Families need to know whether loved ones are dead or alive. And they also want to see the Hague tribunal punish those responsible.

“This is just a step toward closure,” said Amor Masovic, head of the Muslim missing persons agency, as 41 newly identified men were buried this month east of Sarajevo. “Families won’t rest until the criminals are behind bars.”

Most graves would have been uncovered by 1997 if punishment had been swift, Masovic insists. “Serbs know what they did and where they did it, and many would talk if they weren’t afraid of vengeance by former officers still at large.”

After years of slow movement, the Hague tribunal is busy. Gen. Radislav Krstic is on trial for ordering the Srebrenica killings, the worst bloodletting in Europe since World War II. He is the highest ranking of 34 prisoners in custody.

But the two Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, remain free. The independent International Crisis Group has named 75 Bosnian Serbs linked to war crimes who now hold local office.

Meanwhile scientists plod away at their human puzzles.

Specialists can only guess at how many are really missing. The International Red Cross figure is less than 18,000, but its rules allow only immediate relatives to report missing people. In many cases, whole families were murdered.

Bacon believes the real total could be more than 30,000. Many bodies are dispersed in graves that may never be found. Of 3,000 bodies identified so far, only 900 were on the official Red Cross list.

“By now I am convinced that even my grandchildren will be looking for and trying to identify people missing from the Bosnian war,” Masovic said. “Even when we know where they are, we don’t know who they are.”

Scientific advances can help, but “DNA is no magic solution,” warns Adnan Rizvic of the Bosnian Missing Persons Institute, which is building a DNA blood-sample database he expects to be a model for other human catastrophes that might occur elsewhere in the world.

For positive identification using nuclear DNA, the database needs samples from pairs of close relatives. But in many cases, families were massacred with few survivors.

Ed Huffine, an Oklahoman in charge of Bacon’s DNA program, says testing demonstrates one clear fact about Bosnia: “You cannot tell from DNA whether someone is a Serb, a Muslim or a Croat.”

In fact, he added, it showed that the communities around Srebrenica were even more intermingled than comparable populations elsewhere in Europe.

“What happened in Bosnia was not genocide,” Huffine concluded. “It was fratricide.”