The worst mass-killing in Europe since World War II occurred near Srebernica, Bosnia during the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia during the 1990's. Srebrenica, the world's first United Nations "Safe Area" protected alternately by Canadian and Dutch "blue helmets", was an enclave of Bosnian Muslims surrounded by the Serbian forces of what is now Republika Srpska. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina encompassed Europe's only legally established case of genocide since WWII, shocking the international community.
In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb army staged a takeover of the small spa town and its surrounding region. Over a period of five days, Serb soldiers and policemen separated Muslim families and systematically murdered over 7,000 men and boys in fields, schools, and warehouses. Their bodies were transported with earth-moving equipment and dumped in numerous mass graves. As the end of the war approached in the fall and winter of 1995, many of the graves were dug up and the bodies moved to secondary graves, in a concerted effort to further conceal the evidence.
Today, the village of Srebrenica is inhabited mostly by Serbs who had been displaced during the war years. There has been a slow increase in the muslim population as they return to their homes after living as refugees for years. The towns' previous industrial economy is no longer viable and will likely never revive. Consequently, many of the towns original homes and buildings sit abandoned. The huge communist-era hotel in the town is still populated by serb refugees, including some that have been living there since 1995.
The exhumation of mass graves began shortly after the end of the war and international efforts continue. Led by organizations such as: the Federation Commission on Missing Persons, Podrinja Identification Project (PIP) which runs the morgue, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY). The exhumations are done with the cooperation of the Republika Srpska government, and the exhumation sites are guarded by Serb policemen.
Anthropologists, pathologists and other forensic experts from these different organizations all work together on site. Of the 40,000 persons originally missing in the region from the conflicts during the 1990s, ICMP estimates that as of the year 2006, approximately 20,000 were still unaccounted for, of which 15,000 are unaccounted for in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2,500 are missing in Croatia and 2,500 are missing from the conflict in Kosovo. Canadian forensic specialists have been working with the ICMP since 1999 and continue today. The ICMP's technical ability to deploy scientifically accurate forensic analysis including DNA on a large scale means that certainty regarding the fate of the missing can eventually be obtained. "To local authorities it means, inter alia, that misidentifications or retention of information regarding the fate of the missing will be exposed with equal certainty. The credibility of local authorities in the missing persons context is thus increasingly contingent on their willingness to co-operate with each other and the ICMP and to abide by uniform technical, ethical, and legal standards as exemplified by ICMP SOPs and international human rights law."(www.ic-mp.org)
Though several cases related to Srebrenica have been tried successfully at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia at the Hague, the two most wanted men in the Srebrenica case, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remain at large. Milosovec died in 2005.
