The mass graves of Srebrenica
It is now 15 years since the Srebrenica genocide and yet the grim process of identifying the remains of the victims continues. Each mass grave that is exhumed brings more challenges for the forensic experts and turns up still more raw emotions and difficult choices for the relatives of the dead.
This year on the 11 July anniversary the bodies of 775 victims of the massacre were laid to rest alongside the 3,749 already buried in Potocari graveyard.
The burial site is the final resting place for the remains of some of the nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were systematically killed by Bosnian Serb troops over just a few days in July 1995.
The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is the organisation responsible for exhuming the mass graves that are still found around the region.
ICMP Director General Kathryne Bomberger explains that the way in which the massacre was conducted makes the forensic experts' task complicated and time-consuming.
"We know now that extensive efforts went into not only killing these individuals in a rapid fashion over a number of days, but also to removing their bodies from a set of mass grave sites to other mass grave sites so that they would be hidden forever," she says.
As the Serb forces exhumed and reburied their victims using mechanical equipment, the bodies were often broken up and are frequently scattered over several different sites.
Although the remains of nearly 6,500 people have been identified, not all of them have been reburied yet. The country's Islamic religious authority recommends that funerals only take place once 70% of the body parts have been found and identified, a threshold the ICMP feels should be lowered to reflect the reality of the situation. This means many families take the difficult decision to delay the ceremony in the hope that more body parts, or the remains of another relative, will turn up .




