Trying to bury the past, again and again

updated 4:30 p.m. ET July 10, 2009

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina - How many times can you bury your child without going mad?

It's a question that has haunted hundreds of Bosnian mothers facing an agonizing dilemma: As researchers identify remains scattered around mass graves from the Srebrenica massacre, do they bury the first few bones or wait potentially years for a skeleton to come together?

Many choose to bury whatever fragments turn up first. Then another bone is found and they have to reopen the grave. Months later researchers find another piece, and then another — and each time, the women say, it feels like another funeral.

The identification mission being carried out by the International Commission of Missing Persons is a monumental task: More than 8,100 men and boys were killed over five days when Bosnian Serb forces overran a U.N.-protected enclave during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Newly identified Srebrenica remains are usually buried at a memorial center each year on the July 11 anniversary of the start of the 1995 massacre, Europe's worst slaughter of civilians since World War II. After the bloodshed — classified by the U.N. as a genocide — troops led by Gen. Ratko Mladic scattered the bodies in dozens of mass graves that still turn up today.

Ten years after a DNA lab took a drop of blood from Habiba Masic, researchers called her to say they had made a positive identification.

It reopened a new cycle of anguish.

More remains keep turning up
The man at the lab said they had found 90 percent of her husband's body. His bones had been dispersed among four different mass graves.

"And the children?" Masic recalled asking. "The man went silent, and I knew something was wrong."

Video   World's most-wanted war crimes fugitive arrested July 21: After 13 years on the run, Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian-Serb president charged with orchestrating the 1995 slaughter of an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, was arrested in Serbia. NBC's Stephanie Gosk reports. Nightly News

She was told there was no trace of one of her boys but a small part of the other had been found. The problem was DNA analysis could not determine which one he was.

"I couldn't breathe," she said. "I couldn't speak."

Now, she cannot bury the precious fragment, for what would the gravestone say: Sadem Masic, 1976-1995? or Sadmir Masic, 1977-1995?

"Brother is now waiting for brother," she said.

Agency began after massacre
The ICMP, established in 1996 at the urging of former President Bill Clinton, has collected 87,049 blood samples from relatives of the missing, has analyzed their DNA profiles and is now matching them with DNA profiles extracted from the 29,185 bone samples that have been exhumed.

ICMP grew into the world's largest DNA-assisted identification program and so far investigators have helped identify 12,518 individuals in Bosnia. Out of those, 6,185 are Srebrenica victims.

The agency also carries out work in Chile, Iraq, Colombia, Norway, Kuwait and the Philippines. It helped identify victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the remains of those who died in the 2004 Asian tsunami. But Bosnia remains its biggest operation.

During the war, the United Nations declared Srebrenica, besieged by Serbs throughout the conflict, a protected area for civilians. When Mladic's troops overran the enclave, people flocked to the U.N. base in the suburb of Potocari for protection.

Outnumbered Dutch U.N. troops never fired a shot. They watched troops round up the entire population, and take the men and boys away to be shot.

After the massacre, U.S. Secretary of State Madleine Albright waved satellite photos of mass grave sites at Security Council members. Washington knew what had happened and where the mass graves were, she told them.

Cover-up fragmented countless victims' bodies
Serb troops rushed to the sites with bulldozers and moved victims to other locations — now called 'secondary' mass graves — to conceal evidence of war crimes. As the machines plowed up bodies, they ripped them apart and now fragments of the same person can be scattered among several sites.

The ICMP found "one man in five different locations who came to us in 11 different body bags," says the head of the Sarajevo-based organization, Kathryn Bomberger. She believes the enormous cover-up should be considered another war crime.

One thing is certain: It created a forensic science nightmare. "This is the biggest forensic puzzle that exists anywhere in the world," Bomberger said.

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