"Nothing had prepared me to contemplate a mass grave": the never healed wounds of the Bosnian war

A truck can tell the story of a genocide.

The film

by Ognjen Glavonic, recounted how a driver transported mysterious merchandise between Kosovo and Belgrade during the NATO bombings of 1999. The viewer will discover that they were bodies of Albanians, victims of ethnic cleansing by Serb paramilitaries , carried from one place to another so as not to leave traces of mass murder.

in

(Errata Naturae), a book about the mass graves of Bosnia-Herzegovina—and about life and death, the wounds of war, and the will to survive—journalist Taina Tervonen writes: “Maybe the first thing I should be done when investigating genocide is to question truck drivers, bus drivers, and train drivers.

They know.

Like the one that led the investigators to the Tomasica grave.”

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Bosnia, ten years without war

This 49-year-old Franco-Finnish reporter and writer reconstructs in this book, translated by Iballa López Hernández, the Bosnian war (1992-1995) through the most painful mark it has left, the mass burials that shelter thousands of people who still they remain missing.

And she does it through two characters, Senem, a forensic anthropologist, and Darija, an investigator, who have been helping families in this painful search since they were 20 years old, since the end of the conflict.

But its pages also feature dozens of people who saw their world engulfed by violence overnight, who watched as their neighbors denounced, murdered, and tortured people they had known forever.

One of the first discoveries she made when she began to accompany the forensic anthropologists who star in her story is that the sweet and disgusting smell of death never goes away.

It stays on the nose, on the clothes, but above all in the mind.

The other crucial finding was that mass murder requires enormous planning and infrastructure, as well as the complicity of many people.

The executioners almost never kill alone.

The Franco-Finnish writer Taina Tervonen, in an image provided by her editorial Errata Naturae.

When Tervonen contemplated the enormous mass grave of Tomasica, discovered in 2013 precisely thanks to the testimony of one of the drivers who transferred the corpses, he had before his eyes the evidence that the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims by Serb ultranationalists had been meticulously planned.

Nearly 500 corpses appeared in that old mine, of which only half have been identified.

The rest represent families who have never been able to grieve, who still face hundreds of painful unanswered questions.

"I had wondered many times about the logistics of a genocide," he explains in a telephone conversation from Paris, where he lives.

“Hundreds of people cannot be executed without having previously planned and organized it.

It is necessary to get weapons, ammunition, decide what is going to be done with the bodies, where the killings are going to take place.

Many of the accounts that I have heard refer to the question of transportation: it is always at the center of mass deportations, ”she continues.

And that is something that does not only occur in Bosnia: one of the most important books written on the Holocaust,

(Akal), by Raul Hilberg, puts the trains that transported the women at the center of the investigation. victims from all over Europe to the death camps.

“I also thought about the drivers.

They are very important characters”, adds the writer.

“These are survivors, who may have played a crucial role in the killings, but who can also save people's lives,” he explains before recounting the story of a bus driver who had to transport Bosnian Muslims driven from their homes and that he refused to let soldiers into the vehicle, a gesture that prevented a massacre.

A technician takes out a bag with the human remains of a person in the cold room of the Tuzla morgue, where the remains of thousands of people found in mass graves around Srebrenica are located, for later identification at the Identification Center that the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has in the city of Tuzla (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Eulogio Martín Castellanos

"When I got here I didn't know what to expect," the author confesses at the start of the book.

“Nothing had prepared me to contemplate a mass grave.

A mass grave is work.

There is no room for ideas in front of that huge hole from which the bodies must be extracted before winter arrives.

Contact with forensic field work marks all of her great reporting, tinged with admiration for people who dedicate their lives to searching for corpses, because they not only face the smell of death, but also the pain of families. .

They are the ones who dig, but they also investigate and compare the DNA to try to close the thousands of cases of missing persons that were left open after a war during which 100,000 people were killed, most of them civilians.

“Senem and Darija are two very strong women who have a great awareness of a job well done.

They have not chosen what they are dedicated to, they found themselves doing that work a bit by chance”, the author points out.

“And it is heavy and very meticulous work.

It also requires enormous empathy towards families, but also a certain distance.

It is a job that deals with humanity: a disappeared person must become a deceased person”.

Many times these are professionals who have traveled to places where massacres have taken place around the world —Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Iraq, the Balkans, now Ukraine— and who never get used to death or endless pain. of the survivors.

His work has been reflected in other books, for example,

by WL Tochman, or in the reports and investigations of the Spanish reporter Gervasio Sánchez on the disappeared in different conflicts.

José Pablo Baraybar, a Peruvian forensic anthropologist, pointed out at a mass burial in Kosovo: “There are common threads in all the cases of the disappeared that I have dealt with in my life.

One of them is that there are always women walking;

women because the victims of this type of crime are usually men, and who walk because they go from one place to another looking for their disappeared.”

The cases of missing persons in Europe no longer come only from wars and ethnic cleansing: Tervonen has also worked in the immense mass grave that the Mediterranean has become, where thousands of people have drowned —and continue to drown— while trying to seek refuge in Europe fleeing from war, famine and misery.

"I have found that same smell of death on a ship that was carrying dozens of the dead from a shipwreck in Sicily," he explains.

Excavation work at the Tomasica mass grave, in November 2013. HARIS MEMIJA (Xinhua / Landov / Cordon Press)

The Bosnian case is especially complicated because, when the end of the war was nearing, especially after the mass burials were identified by satellite after the Srebrenica massacre —considered a genocide by international justice—, the perpetrators moved corpses from one grave to another in such a way that the remains of the same victim can be scattered in many places.

The International Commission on Missing Persons was created in 1997 to try to identify the disappeared through DNA, which had to be collected from relatives.

It is what Darija is dedicated to, whose mission is not only to search for genetic remains, but to reconstruct stories, lives of human beings, that the corpses hide.

All the information is entered into a database and crossed using a proprietary program until it gives positive results: then, when there is greater than 99.95% certainty that it is that person, the traditional identification process begins. with information after and before death.

This technique, first used in Bosnia, was later applied after the 9/11 attacks, the tsunami and Iraq.

However, while there are still thousands of cases to close, Darija now works alone and covers a third of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Almost 30 years have passed since the end of the conflict and the machine of death and horror has not stopped: now forensic teams are working in Syria, Iraq or Ukraine.

The Bosnian war seems far away, unfairly forgotten, Tervonen argues.

“About Ukraine, it has been said many times that it is the first war in Europe in decades and it is false.

I don't really know why what happened in Bosnia has been so forgotten.

Maybe because he was too close to us, that's why we don't feel like

him”.

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