July 10, 1996
Working at Mass Grave in Bosnia, Investigators Unearth Several Bodies
By CHRIS HEDGES
ERSKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- U.N. war crimes investigators, in the first attempt to exhume a mass grave in Bosnia, unearthed nearly a dozen bodies on Tuesday. The site is believed to hold the remains of some of the thousands of Muslims slain last year by Bosnian Serbs after the fall of Srebrenica.
Working through an intermittent afternoon drizzle, the 20-man team dug up bodies with tattered clothes and bits of decaying flesh clinging to the bones. They used a seven-ton backhoe, picks, shovels, trowels, and a small whisk broom to uncover the remains.
"We have found the edge of the grave by carefully removing the soil, rocks, and debris on top of the bodies," said William F. Haglund, an American forensic anthropologist heading the team. "We're seeing some clothing and we are seeing some bodies now. I imagine there are going to be bodies that are maybe lying on top of each other. How many, and how spread out they are, we don't know yet."
The corpses all lay buried in a shallow grave along a 100-foot embankment near this village, 20 miles west of Srebrenica. Small red flags poked up out of the embankment along a dirt road where diggers had exposed bones, body parts, or bits of evidence.
By the end of the day, human skulls, grayish thigh bones, and soggy black boots were visible and marked off by yellow tape.
Investigators, who say the site is one of the smaller mass graves in this area, suspect that the Muslim victims were lined up by Bosnian Serb soldiers and gunned down along the steep embankment. The bodies, piled one on top of another, were covered with a thin layer of dirt. Many shell casings were found on the opposite side of the road.
The team, heavily guarded by American soldiers from the NATO peacekeeping force, began work on Sunday, checking for land mines, mapping, photographing, and clearing the site. Late on Monday and again on Tuesday, the specialists started to unearth bodies. They expect to exhume all of the bodies here within 10 days.
The forensic specialists, who will hand over the findings from the exhumations to the tribunal, will excavate seven or eight suspected mass grave sites in Bosnia and Croatia this summer. The work will take three months.
At least 4,000 Muslims killed after the fall of Srebrenica are believed to be buried in about a dozen mass graves dotted throughout the rolling hills surrounding the town.
The sites were located through interviews with survivors and from American spy satellite images. While the grave here in Cerska is suspected to hold a few dozen victims, others are said to hold hundreds, and, in one case, as many as 2,700 bodies, investigators said.
Witnesses have placed the Bosnian Serb military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, at sites around Srebrenica where mass killings are said to have taken place.
Mladic and the Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic, have been charged with genocide by the international war crimes tribunal in connection with authorizing and overseeing the Srebrenica killings. The findings of the forensic specialists will be used in the trials of the two men if they are arrested.
"This is part of the process of collecting evidence and proving that crimes were committed," said Cees Hindriks, the chief of investigations for the tribunal, who visited the site on Tuesday. "We will see if this evidence supports the statements of witnesses."
Team members said a refrigerated truck would arrive soon with special containers for the exhumed bodies. They will be moved in about two weeks to Tuzla, where specialists will try to identify each set of remains and determine the cause of death, a process that could take months.
Bodies that are identified will be returned to relatives, and the other remains will be turned over to the Bosnian government, investigators said. The work, the specialists cautioned, will be slow and laborious.
"We will momentarily leave bodies where we find them," Haglund said. "We want to make sure we have each body carefully defined, so that when we go to pick them up we get all the finger bones, foot bones -- everything that belonged to that body.
"Because the more complete the body is, the more complete the story that body or skeleton will tell, and the more complete the information we'll have for generating clues to identification."
