TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Survivors arrive almost every day at a rundown Communist-era sports hall in this city in the hope they can provide a clue that will answer a painful question.

They come to give blood - to have their DNA logged into a database maintained by the International Commission on Missing Persons. They hope that one day a match will be found among the thousands of recovered bones of those who were murdered, their bodies tossed into mass graves.

On July 11, 1995, the U.N.-declared "safe area" of Srebrenica (sreh-breh-NEET-sah) fell to nationalist Bosnian Serb forces. As the troops moved in, many of the estimated 40,000 Bosnian Muslims who had sought refuge in the village and surrounding countryside sought protection at a nearby U.N. military base or fled into the forest in hopes of escape. Over the next several days, an estimated 7,800 people, most of them Muslim men and boys, were massacred.

The commission was created in 1996 to address the issue of an estimated 40,000 people missing as a result of the conflicts that erupted across the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995. Among its primary objectives is to locate and identify the victims of Srebrenica.

"You give the family an answer," said Edin Jasaragic, head of the commission's Identification Coordination Division, which is housed in the same complex where this city's professional basketball team, named Freedom, practices and plays its games. "They know they are dead, but now they know where they are buried. That's all we can do at this point. It's very sad, but very rewarding."

To date, investigators have collected 71,180 blood samples, 19,000 from families of those lost at Srebrenica. They have been compared against 4,400 bone samples of Srebrenica victims that were recovered and analyzed. In some cases, the only remains recovered were a single tooth or a bone fragment a few centimeters in length.

So far, 2,079 death certificates have been issued for Srebrenica victims who have been positively identified, in part through the use of DNA samples.
Most people who come to provide samples are women - mothers, widows, sisters and daughters.

"They're very courageous women looking for the sons, husbands, brothers, fathers," said Vedran Persic, a commission spokesman. "They're very brave and very loud in telling the truth about what happened to them. They don't want the world to forget what happened to them."

Many bodies remain hidden in mass graves spread around the country. Identification of the remains has been further complicated by the fact that the perpetrators later dug up many of the mass graves and reburied the remains in smaller graves to hide evidence, according to commission officials. As a result, many of the remains were scattered and intermingled.

Commission officials operate a facility that seeks to bring together the scattered remains of each body. In addition, the commission sends blood collection teams around the world to collect samples from family members, many of whom fled Bosnia before, during and after the war. In February 2003, commission officials traveled to St. Louis and Chicago to collect DNA samples. About 160 people gave blood.

The commission operates on a $10 million annual budget. Most of the money comes from donor nations, with the United States providing almost half the annual sum.

In addition to its work in the former Yugoslavia, the commission also offered its expertise to help identify victims of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and is working with the government of Thailand to identify victims of the tsunami in December.

Last week, Aziz Salihovic of south St. Louis County came to Tuzla to give blood. He hopes that one day the remains of his father will be identified. Serbian forces separated the 70-year-old from his daughter-in-law and grandchildren as they sought to board a bus at Srebrenica that would take them to safety in Tuzla. He was never seen again.

"It's just too difficult, knowing he hasn't been found," said Salihovic, 39, one of an estimated 4,000 Srebrenica survivors who now live in the St. Louis area. "He deserves a proper burial, not to be disposed of like some dog."

Hasiba Husic counts herself among the lucky. Her 51-year-old father's partial remains were identified this year. He was among those who sought to escape through the forest but failed to reach safety.

Like Salihovic, Husic eventually was granted refugee status and allowed to move to the United States. She, too, resettled with her family in St. Louis, home to an estimated 40,000 Bosnians. She returned to her homeland in recent days to bury her father, Nazir Music, during a service scheduled for July 11 in Potocari. There, the remains of about 1,440 victims already are interred in a graveyard that serves as a memorial to those who died. Her father is one of 583 victims identified this year who are scheduled to be buried Monday.

She is thankful for the commission's work and that her father's remains are no longer scattered across the country. She takes solace in the fact that he now has a final resting place.

"It's really important that I'm able to bury him," she said. "I now know where he is."

Reporter Phillip O'Connor
E-mail: poconnor@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8321