Bosnia: A unique DNA-matching database is to be shared, writes Daniel McLaughlin, in Visoko
A neon sign, a fleeting spark of colour on a bleak winter day, saves the warehouse from complete anonymity.
When its white metal door rolls upward, pouring light on to the wet forecourt, 1,500 plastic sacks are revealed, laid out in neat rows across the floor.
Human bones lie on each of them.
On many there is most of a skeleton, on others just a scattering of ribs and a tuft of black hair. On one, a kneecap sits alone.
The bones, stained by the Bosnian soil, are from just two of the country's dozens of mass graves and belong to Muslim civilians murdered by Serb forces during the 1992-95 war that killed 250,000 people.
Wrapped up against the cold of the warehouse, 15 miles outside Sarajevo, two Polish anthropologists huddle among the serried bones and try to piece together bodies for the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).
"There are about 300 people here from graves in the village of Liplje," says Eva-Elwira Klonowski, surveying the temporary, two-storey morgue.
"But they were only reburied there, after being dug up and transferred from another grave, so the bones are mixed up.
"Sometimes you find one person's thigh bone in one grave and his skull in another, hundreds of kilometres away."
It was a grim process repeated across wartime Bosnia by Serb commanders who sought to hide evidence of their war crimes.
In tiny Liplje, close to Bosnia's border with Serbia, four graves were filled with the bodies of some of the 7,000 Muslim men and boys slaughtered at Srebrenica in July 1995.
Ms Klonowski (58) is adept at reuniting bones separated by the JCB diggers and dumper trucks that sliced through bodies and heaved them in industrial fashion from one hiding place to the next.
"Piecing a skeleton together isn't necessarily hard if we can find all the bits," she says.
"We see skulls shattered by bullets, and the bones of young people are unmistakable. We have a 13- or 14-year-old here. He could not have been a soldier."
Ms Klonowski cuts a section of bone from each skeleton and sends it to the ICMP laboratories, where its DNA is tested and given a unique barcode.
A computer then compares these barcodes to those generated by DNA drawn from blood samples given by the surviving relatives of almost 25,000 missing people.
Where two DNA barcodes match, ICMP scientists can say with 99.95 per cent certainty that those two people are related.
When such a match is made, the ICMP passes the case to the state pathologist for final identification by relatives - often through clothing or possessions found in the mass grave - and a death certificate can finally be issued.
"The remains of fewer than 100 Srebrenica victims were identified between 1996 and 2000," says Adnan Rizvic, deputy director of the ICMP's forensic science department.
"But since our first match in November 2001, we have made some 1,600 identifications of Srebrenica victims, and more than 6,000 in total.
"We do not work for any war crimes tribunal. This is a pure identification effort," Mr Rizvic insists.
"People should know what happened to their loved ones and who killed them."
The ICMP hopes to play a vital role across the former Yugoslavia by helping communities face their past, bury their dead with dignity and look to the future.
It is their experience in this crucial post-conflict task - as well as their unique forensic expertise - that brought Iraqi officials to Sarajevo recently.
Bakhtiar Amin, Iraq's minister for human rights, asked the ICMP for help and advice on dealing with the grim legacy of Saddam Hussein's regime and almost 300 mass graves that have already been discovered.
Iraq's shattered infrastructure - which includes just 20 forensic pathologists and no DNA lab - would be overwhelmed by their contents: the remains of hundreds of thousands of people who were murdered by the security services.
"Saddam turned Iraq into a museum of crimes, a land of mass graves," Mr Amin said in Sarajevo.
"So far we have found 283 mass grave sites, and if the security situation allows we will find more of them.
"It will take more than 30 years to find more than one million missing."
Mr Amin said the pathologists' work had already been complicated by desperate relatives digging through graves to search for the bodies of their relatives, a phenomenon that hampered the ICMP in the first chaotic months of post-war Bosnia.
In response to Baghdad's appeal, the ICMP has agreed to share with the Iraqi authorities its unique DNA-matching database, which also helped identify victims of the attack on New York on September 11th, 2001.
Iraqi scientists are also expected to come to Bosnia for training, and ICMP experts may travel to the Gulf to lend support and expertise.
"If you want accurate identification, this is the way you have to go about it," says Jon Davoren (30), a Canadian senior scientist at the ICMP's Sarajevo lab, of the DNA-matching system he helped develop in Bosnia.
"We have already tried it with [ bone] samples from Iraq, and it works fine. You just need to expand the operation. Srebrenica is our biggest case, involving 7,000 bodies, but you have single sites in Iraq that may contain the remains of 60,000 people."
According to Kathryine Bomberger, the ICMP chief-of-staff, the task of letting millions of Iraqis know what happened to their missing relatives is not only a mammoth logistical task, but a vital part of the effort to bring lasting peace to a ravaged country.
"Resolving the fate of missing persons is a crucial element in providing justice for family members and in allowing any reconciliation process to move forward," she says.
"The authorities in Iraq recognise that unless these mass graves are properly investigated, they could pose a serious threat to social cohesion for generations to come."
With tens of thousands of people still missing across the former Yugoslavia, the scale of ICMP involvement in Iraq rests largely on the international community's willingness to dip into its pocket. The organisation operates on an annual budget of just $9.5 million, made up of contributions from about a dozen countries, including Ireland.
"We need additional funds if we are to work in Iraq as well," says the pugnacious Mr Rizvic in his smoky Sarajevo office. "But of course the ICMP is willing to help in Iraq if the government wants us there.
"Back in 2000 our methods faced big resistance from the scientific community.
"They said that our work would take decades, but step-by-step we have achieved what we wanted."