The war that started in 1992 in the former Yugoslav Republic left more than 32,000 people missing, the majority of whom have been found to date. But the omerta and the political climate in Bosnia prevent thousands of families from mourning.
From the walls of this room oozes a sepulchral dampness. They contain a decor that also grabs you by the throat, as soon as you cross the threshold: fourteen metal tables for fourteen heaps of bones, arranged under the beam of neon lights. Vertebral columns. Fingers. Ribs. Jaws. Basins. Perforated skulls suggesting summary executions. The Visoko morgue has been hiding snippets of the tragedy that took the lives of 100,000 people in Bosnia and Herzegovina for almost thirty years. It is there, in this discreet locality not far from Sarajevo, that is located one of the three laboratories of the country intended to establish the identity of the human remains exhumed after the war started in 1992.
It is the hangar of unknown remains, whose anonymity we are trying to lift. On this cool September morning, behind the greyish facade of the morgue, line the bones browned by time spent underground. Recently exhumed, in the summer of 2022, from a mass grave near the Bosnian capital. All belong to civilians, from the same village, according to Kenan Karavdić, the director of the Visoko morgue. Here, each of the bones is numbered for the office of the prosecutor of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There, points out the man in his gray suit, the sample of a femur has precisely been taken with great care in order to extract the bone marrow and its genetic code.
It was not until the early 2000s that genetic screening became essential in Bosnia to identify the dead, something the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) is working on. Once the DNA has been found, the relatives discover the bones of the man or woman who was a husband or a wife, a brother, a sister, a son or a daughter… “It is the families who will then decide where the burial of the deceased”, says the sixty-something with a serious face and soft eyes. A civil engineer by training, he has worked since 2003 at the Visoko morgue. “The hardest are the situations where we collect remains belonging to children, sometimes two months old. The medical examiners have already started to cry. »
Decimated families
Another adjacent room, this one lit by a dim light, contains the mysteries of Visoko’s morgue. Placed in sealed bags, they pile up on shelves at the end of the corridor: bodies, whole or partial, whose identity remains unknown to this day. Here alone, in Visoko, there would be some 700, coming from the four corners of Bosnia. The country alone would count the remains of 1600 unidentified individuals. Untraceable identities which would be explained by the fact that the isolated DNA does not coincide with any of the samples from the database of relatives of officially disappeared persons. This is because entire families were decimated during the war, plunging hundreds of remains into anonymity.
Genetic identification is just as crucial as the search, upstream, for mass graves. It is the Institute for Disappeared Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina that is working on it. In one of the premises of this state institution – created in 2005 at the instigation of the ICMP, there are thousands of files sorted in filing cabinets: each reveals the identity of one of the people found over the past few years. Twenty-seven years after the war, ended by the Dayton Accords in December 1995, nearly 80% of the approximately 32,000 missing persons have been identified. This is one of the highest rates in the world among conflict-affected countries.
The collection of information can be done online, on the Institute’s website, including anonymously, indicates its spokesperson, Emza Fazlić, that The duty met in Sarajevo. “But it’s the old-fashioned detective method that gets the most results; that of meeting people, from village to village. There is always someone who has heard or seen something. The bones of one and the same person are sometimes found in several scattered mass graves. “There are cases where families do not want to sign the identification certificate of their loved one, because they expect to have more than a piece of bone,” says Emza Fazlić.
The search for the missing is never done according to any ethno-confessional criterion, insists this 40-year-old Sarajévienne. Even if the Bosnian people account for the most dead among the civilians, Croatian and Serb victims are also exhumed.
Excavations strewn with obstacles
In Bosnia, the remains of more than 7,500 individuals are still buried somewhere. That is more than half of the 11,000 individuals still wanted throughout the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The search sites, many of which are concentrated in the east of the country, are as diverse as the obstacles that investigators come up against. Up to a hundred remains are exhumed a year, a figure that has continued to decline in recent years. “Before, nine out of ten excavations were successful. Today, it’s the opposite,” says M.me Fazlic.
The passage of time works against the scientific police. “The families of the disappeared are dying, and so are the witnesses. Witnesses are no longer able to recognize the region, memory may fail. The terrain, too, is changing. What was a field thirty years ago may have become a forest. A territory that also has its share of dangers, since Bosnia still has nearly 180,000 anti-personnel mines underground that have never exploded.
Political, the stake is also. The activities of the Institute, regrets the spokesperson, are thwarted by the “difficult” collaboration with the authorities of Republika Srpska (Serb Republic of Bosnia), one of the two regional entities created by the peace agreements, and the lack of resources granted by the State.
But in a country where the duty of memory is trampling, the omerta weighs down all the more the search for the disappeared, undermining any prospect of mourning and reconciliation. “Many people who have information on the location of graves decide to remain silent. And we believe it is due to the political climate of this country, where Holocaust denial and the glorification of war criminals encourage them to keep quiet. The Srebrenica massacre, although recognized as a genocide by international justice, is a quality of “myth” in Republika Srpska, both among the elites in power and among the population. “There is also the fear of reprisals and of being considered a traitor if one confesses. »
However, some decide to come out of silence. Sometimes, it is on the verge of death that we confide. With this same desire to free his conscience, to “deliver from nightmares”. “Any revelation brings relief to oneself, but also to the families of the victims, affirms Emza Fazlić. They are constantly waiting for the moment when they will find the human remains. They remain prisoners of the past, with no possibility of a future. A bit like Bosnia, paralyzed by a post-war period of division and resentment.
With Ermina Aljicevic
This report was funded with support from the Transat International Journalism Fund–The duty.