By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Nov 26 2001 (IPS)

The mystery of what happened to the over 40 000 people who went missing during the gruesome wars in the former Yugoslav federation in the 90’s will soon be solved with the setting up of the region’s largest DNA laboratory in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

“We’ll start taking the first samples of blood by the end of this year and hope to make a solid data base by springtime next year,” says Ana Kron of the International Commission for Missing Persons, ICMP.

The ICMP was founded by international agencies and aid organisations in 1995, at the end of three year long war in Bosnia. But due to the fact that wars raged almost in all areas of former Yugoslavia in the 90s, it’s tasks were broadened to the whole region.

“We are not interested in establishing the circumstances of death. All we want to do is use the DNA tests to identify the deceased. The criminal aspects are left to other institutions,” said Kron.

DNA is the acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid which is a code used within cells to form proteins which form the basis for the structural framework of life.

Statistics show that out of the 23,5 million people in the six- member former federal Yugoslavia in 1991, between 240,000 and 320,000 died during the bloody wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, air raids in 1999.

At least 40,000 are still officially missing and mass graves with bodies of the victims continue to be dug up throughout the former Yugoslavia.

According to scientists the only way to identify the remains and confirm the death of a missing person is to analyse and compare the available DNA with the DNA of closest relatives.

Tanja Mitrovic of the ICMP office in Belgrade says taking samples for DNA testing is simple but that a complete analyses can take up to several months. “Four drops of blood are enough if they are taken from the closest relatives – mother, father, brothers and sisters. The coded data of relatives is archived together with the samples,” she says.

The DNA analyses will be conducted at Belgrade Institute for Forensic Examination, who are working closely with the ICMP office and thousands of “blind samples” from the remains of nameless victims found in mass graves will be archived at the Institute.

Dutch forensic expert Barend Cohen, who visited Belgrade recently, says the DNA identification is “98 percent correct”. He says when there are no living parents and relatives, blood samples can be taken from children and spouses of the missing. Separating the DNA of the living spouse from their child’s blood will give the material of the missing spouse.

One of the reasons why Belgrade has been selected to host the laboratory stems from the fact that Serbia hosts most of the refugees from former Yugoslavia – more than 650,000 Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Many of their relatives simply disappeared in wars.

“For us, the only way to come to terms with the destiny of our missing loved ones is proper identification and burial of their remains,” says Cedo Maric. “Without that we can not go on.”

Maric heads an organisation that gathers families of missing Serbs from Croatia. In 1995, more than 200,000 Serbs fled the Croatian region of Krajina following a Croatian army offensive to crash Serb rebellion. More than 1,000 were killed then, while some 1,000 are still missing.

Another task will be to establish the destiny of more than 10,000 killed and missing in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.

The regime of former leader Slobodan Milosevic was involved in atrocities against the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo back in 1998 and 1999. When NATO conducted air raids against Serbia ended in June 1999, more than 1,200 Serbs were either killed or abducted by revengeful ethnic Albanians and are still missing. Some 6,000 missing ethnic Albanians are still unaccounted for.

The experience of ICMP in Bosnia will be the basis of the DNA lab’s work in Belgrade.

According to Mitrovic the collection of more than 22,000 samples of blood helped in the identification of many victims of the massacre dating back to July 1995 in the eastern Bosnian zone of Srebrenica.

More than 5,000 remains of Muslim men, executed in cold blood by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, were transferred to Tuzla after they were dug up from mass graves.

“Last week the DNA lab in Tuzla established the identity of another two missing boys from Srebrenica” she said. “It brought final relief to the families and confirmed the value of our work. I hope it will be the same here,” she added.

Excerpt: