SARAJEVO, 19 September 2003 — The remains of almost 500 people, including women and children, slaughtered by Serbs have been exhumed from the largest mass grave from the Bosnian war, forensic experts said yesterday.
“So far we have found 364 complete and 121 incomplete skeletons,” Ismet Music, a member of the Bosnian Muslim Commission for Missing People, told AFP.
Experts expect to find between 70 and 100 more bodies by the end of the exhumation work, he added.
“It is the largest mass grave we have found so far,” Amor Masovic, head of the commission, said.
After eight weeks of digging, forensic experts expect to complete work at the site within the next two weeks.
The 40-meter-long (130 feet) and four-meter-deep (13 feet) grave is in mountainous countryside near the eastern town of Zvornik, which remains in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Sarajevo.
To judge from the clothing found, the dead were all civilians believed to have been killed by Bosnian Serb forces during the war, Music said.
Bullet holes were found in the skull of a three-year old, while the skeleton of a five or a six-year-old child had a bullet in the backbone,” Music said.
The remains unearthed so far are stored in a morgue in the northern town of Tuzla where it is hoped they can be identified.
The authorities were tipped off about the site — in an area known as Crni Vrh or Black Peak — by a witness to the burial of the bodies.
Identity documents found in the mass grave show that at least some of the victims were Muslim civilians from Zvornik and the nearby towns of Vlasenica and Bratunac, killed when Bosnian Serb forces captured them at the outset of the 1992-1995 war.
In mid-1992 Bosnian Serbs backed by the former Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) seized mainly Muslim eastern Bosnia, which includes Zvornik, and victimized its non-Serb residents.
Some 1,500 Zvornik residents are still missing following the Serbs’ notorious wartime campaign of ethnic-cleansing. Around 350 bodies have been found in mass graves in the area.
Relatives of the missing have been visiting the site every day, seeking news of their loved ones.
The grave is also believed to contain the remains of some of the 7,000 Muslim men and boys massacred after Serb forces overran the UN “safe haven” of Srebrenica in July 1995.
The Zvornik site is a so-called “secondary” grave where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies from other sites to cover up their crimes.
Almost eight years after the end of the Bosnia war, the fate of more than 16,000 missing people is still not known, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The remains of more than 17,000 people have so far been exhumed from some 300 mass graves in Bosnia.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander Ratko Mladic, indicted by The Hague-based UN tribunal for genocide and war crimes their troops allegedly committed during Bosnia’s war, are still at large.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is on trial at The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1990s wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. For the Bosnian war he faces a separate charge of genocide.
The war left Bosnia split into two semi-independent entities — the Serbs’ Republika Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Federation.
• A Bosnian Serb doctor, given a life sentence by the UN war crimes court for his activities during the 1992-95 war, is still officially employed in the Serb region of Bosnia, an official said yesterday.
“Milomir Stakic is still on the payroll” at a medical clinic in the northwestern town of Prijedor, the clinic’s director Spomenka Pavkovic told AFP.
The UN court handed down in July its longest sentence to date against 41-year-old Stakic, convicting him of the extermination and persecution of Muslims and Croats during the war but rejecting the charge of genocide.
