Forensic Challenge: How Investigators Found the Yugoslav Wars’ Disappeared

In May 1999, in the midst of the Kosovo war, Serbia's assistant interior minister Obrad Stevanovic made a grim note in his diary while he was having a meeting with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Under the capital-letter heading "PRESIDENT", Stevanovic wrote: "No body, no crime."

"The clean-up of the terrain is most important," Obradovic also noted in his diary, which was used as evidence at Milosevic's trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY as evidence of a cover-up to hide the bodies of murdered Kosovo Albanians.

Locating and identifying the remains of some 40,000 people who disappeared and were often buried in secret mass graves during the Kosovo war and the other Yugoslav wars of the 1990s initially appeared to be an enormous task.

But although several thousand still remain missing to this day, the majority of the bodies have now been found by investigators using all the scientific techniques at their disposal.

Bodies hidden from investigators

Satellite images of the Cerska mass grave site in Bosnia. Photo: ICTY.

"At the conclusion of the armed conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia - in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia in 1995, and in Kosovo in 1999 - the prospects for a sustained and effective effort to account for the tens of thousands of missing persons seemed remote," Sasa Kulukcija, communication officer at the International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP, told BIRN.

Fears of possible prosecution also sparked new cover-up efforts. In September and October 1995, after Western countries asked the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity for access to the crime scenes, the...