A Place to Stand

For 10 years, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has been assembling data on the 40,000 civilians who disappeared in the wars that followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Its archaeologists help to locate burial sites and assist in exhumation. Then Katzmarzyk and other forensic anthropologists work with molecular biologists to apply state-of-the-art techniques to reassociate and identify remains. It is a daunting assignment: The bodies, mostly men of about the same age, have been buried for years. Decomposing pieces of one person could be spread into five different graves and commingled with other parts.

The quest to identify victims began in 1992, when the United Nations asked forensic adviser William Haglund and a team from Physicians for Human Rights to investigate a mass grave in Croatia. Four years later they returned to document war crimes in the Srebrenica region and collect data to match missing people with exhumed bodies there. Early on, families resisted, insisting their relatives were alive, Haglund recalls. The investigators had to build trust and, before asking for a blood sample, have a potential identity in hand. But that led to delays in collecting DNA for shipment overseas and lots of mistaken probable identifications. In massacre situations, up to 40 percent of circumstantial matches turn out to be wrong, according to one recent study in Kosovo.

Furthermore, the original investigation's primary purpose was prosecution, not identification. The G7 Summit nations voted in 1996 to fund an international laboratory that would focus on the missing and could analyze DNA on-site. Many were skeptical, though, that the newly formed ICMP would succeed. "This was based on a sincere concern that the DNA-identification program could create expectations on the part of families and would be unable to deliver," recalls Eric Stover, who directs the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and was on the forensic team in Croatia. Now, he says, the ICMP's work has become a blueprint for similar efforts elsewhere.

Progress was indeed slow until six years ago, when the ICMP shifted to blind DNA matching. Now, instead of starting with family interviews and anthropological forensics, scientists begin with genetic analysis of the remains. Technicians painstakingly recover whatever DNA they can from a bone, then compare 16 markers against a database of DNA profiles from 80,000 survivors who lost a family member during the war. "We're now at our highest efficiency ever," says ICMP forensics director Tom Parsons. In early July, just after its 10th anniversary, the ICMP identified its 10,000th person. Parsons expects results to soon reach 5,000 a year.

Dear Editor,
Your report on the search, using DNA, for the identity of the bodies recovered from Bosnia seems to show a lack of rigour which is unlikely to persuade those who believe that what is going on is a perversion of science to fit a story of good Moslems & evil Serbs which the media have promoted for years.

I was particularly concerned that what has been advertised as a DNA search instead turns out to be based not on identifying the whole DNA of the victim with that of parents but merely finding "16 markers" in common.

This proves nothing. Out of 10s of thousands of DNA links it is a certainty that I & any member of your staff will share many more markers, though we live on different continents.. Indeed we will share that many with any chimpanzee. Since, despite opinions on both sides, the Moslems of Bosnia are not largely Turkish immigrants but drawn from the historic population such markers are bound to repeat extensively. This process should be the start of a DNA search not the end of it, allowing the researchers to identify individuals to whom a full DNA examination would be worthwhile. If somebody's DNA has not been fitted in full to either their own body samples or their parent's they cannot be said to have been positively identified.

I note also that, in discussing the bodies found around Srebrenica, there was no mention of checking the DNA of local Serbs against the "16 points" of comparison. It is a matter of record that the Moslem militia of Srebrenica had, prior to the Serbs attack, been responsible for the genocide of thousands (3,800 have been identified) of civilians from surrounding villages. This was attested to not only by the local Serbian administration, but also, under oath at the Milosevic "trial", by General Marillon, the ranking NATO officer present at the time. Since the bodies under examination were not found in the "mass graves" identified at the time of the alleged massacre of this Moslem militia (they were empty) but close to the villages where the militia under their commander Nasir Oric engaged in his genocide, surely the default position would be to check the DNA of surviving Serbian family members first, yet, despite descriptions of interviews with Moslem families, this goes unmentioned.

The article mentions the slow pace of identification until this dubious process of identification was introduced . This must leave the suspicion that the bodies are actually the otherwise undiscovered bodies of Serb civilians & that far from being an impartial scientific examination what is going on is an attempt to use the name of science to airbrush the genocide of 3,800 Serb civilians & justify NATO's support of the anti-Yugoslav side (all of whom had leaders who, perhaps coincidentally, served Hitler as well as NATO). The fact that one of the directors of the western funded laboratory is Wim Kok, who was PM of the Netherlands at the time when Dutch troops had officially disarmed Mr Oric's troops & were officially manning a cease fire zone around Srebrenica at the when Oric's troops were regularly raiding local villages & shooting, & to be fair beheading their populations. This must strain Mr Kok's ability to oversee an impartial investigation.
Yours Sincerely
Neil Craig

// posted by neil craig @ 4:48 pm