Croatian and Bosnian war victim identification
Croatian and Bosnian war victim identification refers to the ongoing efforts to identify the remains of individuals who were victims of genocide during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. With an estimated forty thousand individuals missing from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, forensic scientists have faced significant challenges in identifying victims, many of whom were executed and buried in mass graves. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has played a crucial role in these efforts, particularly through the establishment of a DNA database that compares genetic material from living relatives to the remains found in mass graves. This method, particularly the use of mitochondrial DNA, has proven essential in identifying victims, especially those from the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
Identification efforts have involved a range of specialists, including forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, and pathologists, collaborating to excavate remains and assess the circumstances of deaths. However, challenges persist due to limited medical records, the homogeneity of the victim population, and the disturbance of mass graves. Despite these obstacles, by 2023, the ICMP reported significant progress, with approximately 70% of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina identified and two-thirds in Croatia. These identification efforts not only serve to provide closure to families but also contribute to the broader pursuit of justice and acknowledgment of the atrocities committed during the wars.
Croatian and Bosnian war victim identification
- DATE: Began in 1996
THE EVENT: Forensic scientists have been involved in ongoing efforts to identify the bodies of victims of genocide recovered from mass graves in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
SIGNIFICANCE: The deaths of thousands of individuals in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s presented a daunting victim identification task for forensic scientists. Despite a number of factors hindering identification efforts, progress has been made, in large part owing to the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons, which established a program to collect DNA samples from living relatives of the missing.
The wars that took place in the former Yugoslavia in the period 1991–95 resulted in the disappearance of an estimated forty thousand individuals from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina alone. Many of those who disappeared were executed in acts of genocide and buried in mass graves throughout the countryside. In 1996, forensic scientists began the task of locating these clandestine grave sites and identifying the victims. Since that time, thousands of individuals have been excavated from mass graves and their remains have been examined for purposes of identification and determination of the cause and manner of death. Law-enforcement investigators, pathologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, odontologists, radiologists, and database technicians have worked collaboratively in the identification process.
Identification
A number of agencies have played important roles in the efforts to identify genocide victims from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, including Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (UN-ICTY), the Bosnia State Commission on Missing Persons, and the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). Much of the effort of the UN-ICTY has involved the documentation of genocide and has focused on the use of forensic evidence from mass graves in the prosecution of war criminals. Other agencies have placed greater emphasis on identification of remains and the return of those remains to living relatives.
A number of factors have hindered efforts to identify the bodies found in the mass graves of the former Yugoslavia. For one thing, antemortem (before death) medical and dental records for comparison to the bodies are nonexistent or difficult to find for most of the missing, unlike in the United States and Western Europe, where such records, along with fingerprints, are commonly used in the positive identification of remains. The unidentified population is also relatively homogeneous—the majority of the victims are young to middle-aged adult males. Further, methods for estimating age at death and stature from skeletal remains are often based on North American standards, which are inappropriate for Balkan populations; forensic anthropological assessments are thus limited.
For some time, the teams working on identifying the genocide victims relied heavily on clothing and personal effects (such as identification cards and religious items) found with the bodies in making presumptive identifications. It became increasingly apparent, however, that this method could lead to misidentifications, as the clothing and personal effects associated with remains may not have belonged to the deceased. Another hindrance to identification of remains has been the fact that many mass graves have been disturbed by human scavengers; as these grave robbers attempted to hide some remains in secondary locations, they created large-scale commingling of remains of individuals and also separated some intact bodies into multiple body parts.
International Commission on Missing Persons
In 1996, the ICMP was established to develop an antemortem database of missing persons that could be compared against postmortem records of unidentified remains. This effort, which remained ongoing, requires that the ICMP develop close working relationships with the families of the missing; since 1999, this has included the widespread collection of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) samples from living relatives of missing persons. Because nuclear DNA is often degraded in the decomposed remains taken from mass graves, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is more abundant in the cell and less susceptible to degradation, is often used for identification. This type of DNA is inherited along the maternal line, so samples taken from unidentified remains can be matched only to relatives who share the same maternal mtDNA as the victim. DNA analysis has been essential in the identification of victims of the massacre that took place in the Bosnia and Herzegovina town of Srebrenica in July 1995, in which approximately eight thousand Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men died.
The ICMP considers DNA testing the gold standard for positive identification; over time, the organization has placed decreasing emphasis on presumptive methods of identification. After the ICMP began its DNA program, the numbers of persons identified increased dramatically; in 2002 alone, approximately twelve hundred individuals were identified, more than a tenfold increase over the numbers identified in all the previous years combined. New developments in DNA technology continued to provide the best avenue for identification of remains in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, where traditional methods have had limited success. However, forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, and pathologists continued to play pivotal roles in the meticulous excavation of remains recovered from mass graves, in the sorting of commingled remains from primary and secondary grave sites, and in the assessment of the circumstances surrounding death. By 2023, the ICMP estimated that 70 percent of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina had been accounted for. Two-thirds of the more than five thousand people in Croatia who were reported missing had also been accounted for.
Bibliography
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