A labor of love

On the road back to Tuzla, there were several memorials to the dead, in what is called the "Road of Death." The green stakes are gradually being replaced by white stone markers - creating fields of marble on the sides of the road.

In the center of Tuzla there is a park with the memorial cemeteries to those killed during the war. Tuzla, however, was relatively safe for Muslims during the war; its greatest problem was the result of the inundation of refugees from the surrounding areas. Though many of the houses were shelled, the death toll in Tuzla was lower than in other areas of the country. That being said, the very personalized cemetery in the center of the city was very moving.

We spent our final day in Tuzla at the ICMP - the International Commission of Missing Persons. We are grateful to the staff that they were willing to meet with us and teach us about their work.

In the wars of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, there were approximately 40,000 missing people; 30,000 of them were Bosnian.  One of the key obstacles to identification has been a lack of ante-mortem information. In addition, in 1995 several secondary graves were created – i.e. some bodies are located in several graves – making a complete identification very difficult. The role of the ICMP is to identify the remains of mass graves in order to bring closure to families. The ICMP lab in Bosnia is now the most sophisticated in the world. Bodies from the tsunami in Thailand and from hurricane Katrina were sent to these labs for identification.

From 1996 - 1999 laboratories in Bosnia were inadequate to deal with the volume of the work. Evidence was sent to labs in the UK, Poland, USA, and Spain. In 2000 the ICMP began using a DNA – led identification process.  This uses nuclear DNA testing instead of y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA testing.   Originally they had a database of missing individuals, but no information about the families. Task forces had to find the relatives of the missing. Many were still living in collective centers, and this facilitated the data gathering. When contact was made, information was gathered about family members as well as information about the last days of the missing individual. Blood samples were taken.  These are called reference samples. Through 80,500 blood samples, they have been able to successfully identify 27,200 missing.

All reference samples – both bone and blood – are bar coded to protect the confidential nature of the sample. DNA matching software compares bone samples with given blood samples. There is always a number of possible matches; A 99.95% level of confidence is the minimum required for a match to be acceptable.  Usually, however, it is closer to 99.9999999% However, problems still remain. For example, if only the mother is alive, they can correctly identify her children, but they cannot tell which is which unless they were married and had children as well.

From the laboratories we went to the morgue where 6500 body bags still hold remains that are waiting to be identified. The ICMP does not do the exhumation of mass graves; they told us, however, that a recently a mass grave was discovered. It took three and a half weeks to exhume the grave.  258 bodies were found, of which only five were complete. One of the key tasks at the morgue is the re-association of body parts. One individual's remains may be in several bags. Once enough of an individual is identified, the family is contacted so that burial can be arranged.

From the morgue we returned to Sarajevo where we visited the DNA sequencing lab before meeting with those responsible for working with the families.